AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, May 15, 2010.
WHAT The Navigators
WHERE Karen Woodbury Gallery, 4 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 2500, kwgallery.com
Notions of materiality are central to this adventurous new group show at Karen Woodbury. Indeed, the work that comprises The Navigators orientates itself around the recasting of found objects, refuse and originally unintended resources. There are several highlights. Derek O’Connor’s weighty, highly textural paintings re-imagine and extend the visual language of record covers and hardcover books via slathers, slabs and swirls of oils. Nicholas Folland’s upturned, backlit crystal bowls and objects, meanwhile, recontextualise otherwise familiar objects as ornate light transmitters. The standouts, however, belong to Rhys Lee and Lionel Bawden. Like an ode to the lost memory and seemingly indiscriminate life-stuffs, Lee’s striking pair of bronze, silver patina and mixed media sculptures recast found objects and refuse (such as dead birds and dolls’ heads) to render ominous, unnerving but somehow familiar trophy pieces. Bawden’s stunning wall-mounted sculptures (pictured, above) render sinuous, organic forms from solid, adhered blocks of hexagonal colour pencils. It’s a perfect, concise summation of The Navigators’ conceptual objectives. Bawden uses uniform, symmetrical source materials to fashion fluid, untethered landscapes that are anything but. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until May 29.
WHAT Tim Handfield: Plenty
WHERE Colour Factory Gallery, 409-429 Gore Street, Fitzroy, 9419 8756, colourfactory.com.au
Tim Handfield’s vast, sharp, colour-saturated suburban streetscapes, building sites and wastelands render a kind of alien Australiana. His photographs from the limits of Plenty Road and Melbourne’s new north capture both aesthetics of aspiration and the odd, slightly unnerving interface between urbanity and environment. Towering ‘McMansions’ perch amid symmetrically planted European trees and native vegetation; makeshift ladders and tree-house refuse litter a bulbous, alien gumtree; a smashed television lies in deep grass; pink children’s clothes splay out against a bed of dry, brown leaves; the exposed insulation lining of a half-built house glows a lurid, bright green against the soft brown of the soil. But there’s more at play within these photographs than the dichotomy of their setting. Indeed, there’s something of a formal tension to these works. Though Handfield positions his practice in the context of topographic photography, the sheer saturation of suburban colour seems reminiscent of photographers like Melbourne-based Brit Louis Porter. It leaves these works in something of an interesting, but awkward space. While Handfield’s referents and subject matter are in themselves quite potent, the clean, controlled nature of his compositions and treatments are lacking almost entirely in signature or texture. In many ways, that’s the point – these are meant to be observational, topographic photographs – though at times, it leaves them feeling a little flat. Fri 8:30am–5pm, Sat 1pm–4pm, until May 29.
WHAT Lisa Tomasetti: Burnt Memory
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au
A collaborative work with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Lisa Tomasetti’s Burnt Memory subverts and deconstructs the gaze. Across a suite of 12 rich, large-scale prints, she skirts the formal qualities and devices of Old Master paintings, only to deny them of their inherent Anglo-centrism. Indeed, Tomasetti’s female subjects – or ‘sitters’ – are Australian’s of non-Anglo descent. The surety of white, middleclass subject against the sumptuous backdrop is altered via context. In these photographs, the subjects – dressed for the most part in traditional cultural garb – find themselves in an empty, darkened, arcane post-industrial scene. Light is scarce; meek shafts filter from tiny elevated windows, capturing only the surfaces directly in their path. There is a hue, a texture, a lush tonality to the darkness, as if memory and experience lurk. It is both beautiful and ominous. The allegory seems one of the multiplicity and complexities of contemporary Australian female experiences, experiences without linear, necessarily localised or white, middleclass roots. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until June 12.
WHAT Glenn Walls: Projects for Total Urbanisation
WHERE John Buckley Gallery, 8 Albert Street, Richmond, 9428 8554, johnbuckley.com.au
The sculptural works and photographs that comprise Glenn Walls’ Projects for Total Urbanisation echo with architectural and technological resonance. But Walls’ doesn’t exist in the realm of celebration. The photographic series features a collection of shabby, empty 1960s interiors, some scrawled with abject maxims like “MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IS A LIE” and “A GRAND OLD FEELING OF EMTINESS”, others with a hooded figure crouched miserable on an old mattress, a block-like configuration reminiscent of classic Meis van der Rohe house rendered on the wall in masking tape. Walls’ sculptures offer similar propositions. In one, a balsawood rendering of a 1980s tape deck – now something of a techno fetish item – is overtaken by globs of expanding foam; in another, an intricate, web-like balsawood structure is mounted on four skateboard trucks, each positioned in such a way that the wheels are locked. While the potential for movement is there, it is rendered impossible by design. What Walls seem to be getting at here is the disconnect between inspiration and large-scale application. Despite grand plans and intentions, his scenarios, scenes and objects have been choked and nullified at every turn. These are the symptoms and effects of poorly laid plans. 11am–5pm Wed to Sat, until May 29.
