THE COLOUR IS RIGHT ON THE MONEY
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, May 5, 2010.
WorldWide Optimism Sarah Hughes, Sutton Gallery, 254 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, until May 15.
I Wander Charlie Sofo, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, until July 25.
Dan Rule Reviewer.
To many of the artistic inclination, the idea of world economics, consumer price indexes or international monetary data equates to little more than a blip of white noise. To others, it’s just plain,light coma-inducing, dry.
With this in mind, it’s something of a shock to realise just how deeply the work of New Zealand artist Sarah Hughes is entrenched in the global numbers game. Spanning both spaces at Sutton Gallery, the intensely vibrant, acrylic-on-linen works that comprise new collection WorldWide Optimism blush with sticky, hypnotising candy store colour. White, horizontal bands interrupt a rainbow of vertical stripes; repetitious geometrical patterns form stunning colour swatches; shards of colour wrangle for space.
But what might at first seem to deal in abstraction is in fact loaded with statistical data and detail. In the smaller space, the three-piece Bank Homepage Series (2009-2010) maps the proportion of specific colours used on the homepages of major bank websites, arranging each hue into a grid of repeating zero and comma motifs. The pair of vast paintings that bookend the main gallery, meanwhile, use a honeycomb-like arrangement of hexagons to represent vast numbers of statistics relating to global wellbeing and international average happiness studies, making aesthetic reference to Depression era quilting techniques in the process.
The sheer statistical depth is dumbfounding to say the least, but what grants these works their real vigour is their semiotic complexity and sense of aesthetic paradox. Indeed, while Hughes’s arrangements and compositions espouse a syntax of graphs, diagrams and other visual techniques for mapping economic data, her colour palette effectively hijacks and eschews our analysis at every turn.
The more time you spend with her work, the more it works to expound the tricks and tics of visual language. In the end, we’re left with a bouquet of arbitrary, artificial nonetheless attractive colour configurations. Indeed, the world of macroeconomics seems absurd when represented in dazzling, candy-hued technicolour.
Young Melbourne artist Charlie Sofo assumes a vastly different vantage in I Wander, his poetic collection of video and installation works at Heide’s Project Gallery. Running alongside a stunning survey of Malaysian-Australian photo artist Simyrn Gill and a study of Albert Tucker’s bushrangers, Sofo’s work exists in something of a local microcosm. Across three videos, a series of texts and kind of sculpture, he maps, documents and undertakes “experiments” around his home suburb of Northcote.
Though place and locale are hardly new avenues of enquiry in contemporary art, Sofo’s engagement is refreshingly original and, at times, happily mischievous.
A common strand is musicality. He chooses not to elaborate on contexts, histories or narratives, but instead on sound, surface and immediate setting. One video work sees a montage of Sofo dragging a drumstick over countless fences, gates and walls in his local area. Each scene is tightly framed and shot from the hip, with only Sofo’s hand, the drumstick and the immediate sonic surface in view. We’re afforded a rare kind of texture and lyrical resonance. It’s oddly, but genuinely intimate.
Another video features photographs of birds perched on electrical wires, which Sofo has then translated to notes on a musical stave. As each photograph appears onscreen, its corresponding note rings out; a song emerges; something out of nothing.
There are other experiments. The pages of a book splayed out on bench detail various public “interactions” – including standing in an aisle at Coles with his eyes closed for two minutes, lying down in car parks and standing in strangers’ front yards – which skirt, but never quite stoop so low as a genuine prank.
A fascinating work is the sculptural installation, which features countless balls of various sizes that Sofo either found, was given or made from materials gathered on his walks around Heide. While it may seem innocuous at first, what the piece manages to do is give us an entirely different insight into the grounds on which we stand.
It’s precisely this quality that gives I Wander its unusual charm. This isn’t so much about our social, historical and geographic place in the world, but our immediate, tangible interface with it.
