CAUGHT UP IN A TANGLED WEB OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, May 12, 2010.
Outerspace Julie Rrap, Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, city, until May 29.
First Born Doble & Strong, Block Projects, Level 4, 289 Flinders Lane, city, until May 29.
Light Hold Emily Ferretti, Sophie Gannon Gallery, 2 Albert Street, Richmond, until May 29.
Dan Rule Reviewer.
The increasingly dynamic relationship between art and the public is no secret in contemporary art. The notion of the gallery as a virtual space that the once inert viewer must now actively negotiate is one central to a great deal of current practice.
It’s a premise that resonates throughout the ever-prolific Julie Rrap’s new body of work at Arc One Gallery. Comprising a series of performative photographic and video works – plus a web-like installation of the same black fabric straps that feature in the images – Outerspace requires us not just to view the works, but to enter and in a sense become them.
As with the majority of Rrap’s work, Outerspace uses the body as its fundamental motif. The large-scale photographs and video reveal the artist, adorned in black, seemingly suspended amid the angular network of straps. She appears to hang upside down, horizontally, vertically; she twists and turns in various phases of contortion, apparently floating. In one image, a strap covers half her face whilst another coils tightly around her hand, rippling the skin.
We too are restricted, our own movements around the gallery checked. We have to hurdle a low-slung strap only to duck another at head-height. The video, which is projected through the strapping and onto a far wall, becomes a kind of interface between the virtual and tactile installations with the straps throwing shadows onto the screen, locking Rrap’s body deeper in the web.
But Rrap’s deeper entrapment is an illusion – mere shadows cast. We begin to question our own perceptive qualities; we search for breaches in Rrap’s virtual world. The representation of the suspended body shifts from documentation to assume a more illusory guise.
First Born, the inaugural collaboration between Melbourne-based artists Robert Doble and Simon Strong at Block Projects, utilises the image of the human body to dramatically different ends. Comprising eight massively scaled photographic and gloss enamel works mounted on aluminium composite – plus an extensive series of smaller scale “studies” – the show deconstructs and mutates the archetypically flawless human image.
Naked, perfectly proportioned male and female models assuming various sensuous poses are interrupted by intense, dominating swirls of enamel. Faces are obscured, bodies are flayed open with splotches and splatters of bloody paint. It’s corporeal, visceral, graphic to the point of near horror. Yellow and opaque blooms grow over a naked female form in Chromoplast, the lurid, seemingly fungal matter glowing obscenely against faultless black skin. Gore-like splatters cloak faces. Modular sponges of pink trace, spread and extend their way along bodily contours. Scars, tubes and medical receptacles link subjects like a chain.
There’s a fascinating polarity to the works. The paints acts as a like a violent gesture towards photographs; it turns the body inside out. On the one hand, the violence seems to allude to the unnatural sheen of fashion photograph. It illustrates that the flawless body is in fact a living, functioning, corporeal bag of blood and guts.
Another vantage, however, might see such an unearthing as a reflection on medical science – a paean to the mystique and poetry of human form and a reflection on the de-humanising horror of the surgical table.
Emily Ferretti’s light, economical use of line, tonality and texture couldn’t be further removed. Her new collection of oil-on-linen paintings at Sophie Gannon Gallery – aptly dubbed Light Hold – evidences a feather touch. Indeed, Ferretti’s plants, nests, ping-pong tables, baskets and ephemera almost resemble watercolours.
What makes Ferretti’s paintings so attractive is their spaciousness. The weightless, painstakingly subtle palette applied to works like Teen Oak and Fern Fountain is almost dreamlike, the delicately rendered domestic plants floating meekly against an empty, white backdrop.
By isolating her subjects from context, the young Melbourne artist bestows them a particular gravity. Her ability to turn a ping-pong table net or clothesbasket into a thing of quiet, delicate beauty is a rare art in itself.
In Light Hold Ferretti shows that the lightest touch can often be the most transcendent.
