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Pictures 2: More Pictures

A review of group exhibition at Animal House Fine Arts, Aug-Sep 2023

I wasn’t there to see the previous instalment of Pictures and I didn’t ask Matt about it but Tori said it was referring to a show previously held at savage garden. My mind could not help but wander to the drawings: more drawings exhibitions circa 2019/2020; another serialised set of “somethings: more somethings” exhibitions. Unlike Drawings: more drawings, which sought to ignite, or incite something in Melbourne during a time that retrospectively feels defined by aesthetic incoherence and spasmodic disunity, Pictures: more pictures surveys a brief moment when the Melbourne aesthetic is fluid, and painterly sensibilities seemingly reign supreme. 

Walking into Pictures 2, two long and narrow walls of noisy black marks ominously greet viewers, serving as an unofficial initial focal point. Stochastic ink-like blotches punctuate the nearly-too-sepia-to-be-unprimed canvases, leaving enough blank space between marks to give them a dense fullness. These twin monoliths loom bold and strange. There’s a hardness to their authority, a kind of stylistic opaqueness that feels familiar but rarely seen. There is an odd nature to Dick Watkins’ paintings, a nature which becomes apparent when it is revealed that they’re dated to the late 70’s. It somehow feels very ‘of the moment’ to inaugurate the ‘now’ through the ‘before’ that preceded it, to pretext today’s painting through yesterday’s sensibilities (or possibly the other way around). Dick’s work doesn’t feel out of place among the lexicon of painting today, albeit less anxious about the tension of the over/under worked surface rife in the current aesthetic psyche. How little and yet how much has changed over half a century. This lack of tension lends some authority to his work but also a sense of naivity. Dick’s paintings serve as a sort of naturalising inversion of Anabel’s work, which is situated directly opposite Dick’s. In contrast with Dick’s paintings, Anabel’s painting feels like it offers almost nothing but tension. Anabel’s lines are direct but random, her composition sparse but terse. The unexpected line of pencils and strip of cheap bronze spray paint miraculously avoid forming any clear associations to anything cogent, but somehow straddle the edges of what feel like references. The quasi-iridescent canvas bears countless little scuffs and pencil marks, resembling a paper handout that was tarnished in a school-bag on the way home from school. The markings feel organic and atmospheric but not so much as to distract or labour the point of their ambience. There’s a playfulness to Anabel’s work that isn’t even very playful, it just captures a sense of genuine bewilderment through a kind of targeted amateurism that isn’t cynical. In a medium with so little wiggle room, Anabel is refreshingly capable of defying expectations, and I am of the opinion that she is a visionary and auteur of painting. The only other time in recent memory where an artwork so simple has stirred and surprised me so much were the new works on board by Alethea at asbestos earlier this year, where the basic protruding blocks, found objects and flat mat colours produced something that felt truly new. Anabel and Alethea both make work that feel otherworldly. Short, broken, barely clinging to any sense of logic, but unmistakably structured, the result is nothing short of magic, revealing all of the hidden rules and expectations by flouting just enough of them to not lose form.

Next, I encounter Dylan’s iterative canvases. Dylan repeats and modulates simple flag-like designs, repeating patterns on a set of nine identical rectangular canvases; rectangles set in the corner of the canvas, or thick and thin stripes partially or completely spanning the horizontal or vertical axes of the canvas, etc. Dylan’s paintings span a dizzying array of sharp contrasting patterns and colours. Brazen silvers against leopard-like fluorescent orange and black, harsh blocks of black set against gradating silvers. Sometimes the lines are clean and sharp, sometimes they are blotchy and messy. After the numbing subtlety that initially dominates the room, looking at the harsh colours and straight lines displayed in Dylan’s work feels like staring directly into the sun. For the most part Pictures 2 contends with a brand of simplicity that is monosyllabic and slow to reveal its nature, Dylan’s work too explores the arresting quality of simplicity but in a manner that feels immediate and precise. However, this immediacy is deceptive. Through the barrage of colours and sharpness, hidden strokes of slow movement reveal themselves in the perceived stillness of the detail. the incomplete lines, the obfuscated numbers and letters, the serpentine long dry brushstrokes under the surface, the pastel purples, the beige white wash. Dylan’s work resaturates the exhibition, shedding a whole new light on the bright boldness that otherwise becomes invisible in the other works; the caustic quality of the bronze strip in Anabel’s, the way in which the scale of Dick’s paintings merges them together and turns the gallery wall between them into an invisible stroke. The room hums as one, mise en scene, conflict, resolution; the blank and the bold stare into an abyss and emerge complete. The inclusion of Dylan’s work in the exhibition feels necessary and relevant to the specific milieu Matt seems to be surveying, albeit demoting its status to tertiary, or additional to the form created in the union of Anabel’s and Dick’s paintings. All three operate at a similar pace, fickle and understated, punctuated by aggressively dominant moments that threaten to take precedence and overwhelm, but never quite manage to break through the deceptively demure background. 

At a glance, the inclusion of Tori’s work in this show seems conceptually sound, in the sense that she too deals with surface tensions that threaten tipping over the mark of good taste. But Tori’s work employs an inverted logic to the rest of the room. The difference between ‘The Overworked’ and ‘The Underworked’ surface might seem superficial because it is noodly and not always easy to language, however the difference is felt and apparent through the contrast in the room. Tori, being the only one operating in a separate modality in the show, becomes a de facto emissary of the countertrend, and the point of comparison to the rest, even requiring three works to balance out the trio around her. In  this sense Tori’s work serves as a disrupter in the show, a spanner in the works. Both milieus depicted in Pictures 2 are capable of employing either maximalist or minimalist methods to accentuate their nature without undermining their general oeuvre. Trying to collapse the two milieus into one show highlights their separateness despite their mutual intelligibility, both sharing a Melbournian aesthetic lingua franca. The immediate distinction appears as the union of all works together feels a little noetic, working well in theory but appealing to very cerebral sensibilities of texture, colour and space. The result of this union feels a little clumsy. Detangling the works from each other highlights some aesthetic rules of thumb. The difference between the Overworked and Underworked surfaces is often hinted at by the number of aesthetic constituents that make up the artwork, such as how many colours are used, how many brushing techniques, how many figures or styles of figuration are apparent, etc; BUT this is a rule of thumb only, and is by no means a definitive criterion. More specifically, The Underworked will more often bare its materiality, and will be less illusory in its figurative nature. The Underworked surface will draw your eyes to negative spaces and complicate the relationships between empty and full. The Overworked surface conversely, like an optical illusion, will draw the eye to negative spaces that have been carved out of positive additions. Though bare negative spaces might still be left on the surface, these will feel secondary, often just creating a platform or frame. The Underworked surface flirts with the question “have they done enough?”, the Overworked surface will ask “did they do too much?”. The Underworked excavates explosive singular moments, The Overworked collapses infinity into one. Where Anabel’s work cautiously treads the understated, Tori’s paintings revel in the poetry and tragedy of saying too much, epitomised in the inclusion of the entire Alphabet in the painting directly to the right of Anabel’s painting. Tori blends foreground and background with an exhaustive swallowing blotchiness; murky greens and browns that melt into purples, magentas and reds, blotted together in a slow but impatient slur. Colours that barely have the space to differentiate nearly suffocate each other right up to the very edge of the canvas, with only the bleeding edges against the wall offering glimpses of release. Through the murkiness emerge momentary fragments; figures, letters, horizons, worlds that lurk beneath the surface. Tori’s paintings are not messy, or sludgy like a swamp, they are contained and revelatory, like primordial waters, fighting to emerge into creation, barely able to break the through the viscous surface tension. Matt guides us to connect the dots between the Overworked surface and Underworked surface, as though one pantomimes the other, but in so doing I think he fails to highlight their epistemic differences. Though I find Tori’s work charming in its own right, I don't really follow the thread so clearly here in relation to the explosive sparseness provided through the aesthetic union of Anabel, Dick and Dylan. It’s like there are two exhibitions happening in Pictures 2, regarding two separate emerging cannons in Melbourne right now.

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LIGHTS ARE ON BUT NOBODY’S HOME

Alternate Exhibition text for Layo's gradshow, Jun 2024

1 In a dimly lit gallery, Layo sits. The set is mostly unfurnished, except for Layo's chair and several artworks. At stage right are two large frames leaning against the wall. Draped over one is a blank canvas, and the other has canvas wrapped around its stretcher bars. To stage left are two easels wrapped with translucent wax paper, either hung up or leaning against a wall. Both are collaged with cardboard and A4 printer paper, some scrawled with names. The room feels unfinished and incomplete, but not rushed or hurried.

2 A single spotlight turns on, swallowing the outskirts of the set in contrasting darkness, and revealing an anaemic expression on Layo’s face. Layo comes to and looks around at his exhibition; his mind wanders through memory lane as he stands up and paces through the installation, remembering and then forgetting things he wanted to say, reciting old words that have long outlived their context, only a glimmer of their previous lustre maintained through the phenomena of their utterance. Running lines, but the script is all wrong. Silence becomes him.

3 The magic of theatre, when done right, is the suspension of disbelief. The set, the stage and the actor reveal their artifice openly and foster a trusting rapport with the audience. This rapport makes possible the ‘play’, the enchantment that allows fiction to question reality without challenging the audience’s grasp on it. The disarming ambience of theatre is the dreamlike state Layo achieves through an ineffable spatial sensibility. Layo assembles quasi-ironic sculptures and canvases that gesture at being artworks without truly achieving that status. The set he builds is vacant of content but enriched with intent; ‘vacant’ in the sense that the works don’t seem to speak beyond their materiality, ‘enriched’ in the sense that they converge to transcend their materiality and establish a mood. Unlike a new-materialist, who uses the unadorned form to bolster the subjectivity of the object they are presenting, Layo diminishes the identity of his objects. The forms of his pieces are somewhat perfunctory - more about generating an ambience than revealing something inherent to their material, like repeating a name over and over until it just becomes a sound, more for the purpose of ritual than for trivial deconstruction.

4 The draft serves as his final form. His assemblages are quick and rough. He crudely obscures surfaces that have nothing on them to reveal. waxing and waning, stuck between deflection and reflection. Nothing is finished, everything is complete. He hangs a canvas up on the wall, but nothing becomes of it. He sets his stage for a play but there are no actors in it. A sobering thought emerges through the rubble, only to disintegrate in the barren mind of its bearer. Something borrowed. Something stolen. Something opportune. A blackened shroud, a hand me down gown of rags and silks, a costume fit for one who sits and cries. And when the dance is over, when the curtains are finally called, she’ll turn once more to Sunday's clown and cry behind the door.

[winterfrozelifeoutoffall]

LIGHTS ARE ON BUT NOBODY’S HOME

Exhibition text for Layo's gradshow, Jun 2024

Exhausting all possibilities. Defiling all options. Violating the archive. London. Melbourne. Paris. Vienna. America and more. Repeating names over and over to revert them into unintelligible sounds. Not for trivial deconstruction, but for some kind of ritual. Dashes of greylead puncture the surface over and over and over, marauding page and canvas, crudely obscuring surfaces that have nothing on them to reveal. Quick and fast, hard and blunt. Deceivingly involuntary. Products of some magic, products of some rigour, products of some love. Over and over and over again.  The bard hacks his throat and sings songs of flowers long gone.

But we won’t learn.

Nothing new is new.

Possibility is endless.

The list goes on.

Great exhaustion spurs a need for dazzling references. Things that arrest the soul. Things that look or feel unusual. Doesn't even matter what, just different. Surprising and  earnest. Offensive to laggards. Exhaustive but incomplete. Not so much world building as life affirming. Moment rejecting. Future postulating. Looking inwards, projecting outward. Alien to others but not alienating. Inviting. Playful. Deceitful by nature, obsessed with itself and with its environment. Defined by its own negation. Come and play. Hiding behind the fear of killing your darlings. Something new is wrangled in the process, with it conjuring another opportunity for something beautiful to die.

Layo says too much.

Layo doesn't say enough.

Layo anonymises names, titles and poetry, reducing them to their barest material form. 

He weaves them through a barren field of quasi-ironic sculptures and canvases that gesture at being artworks without truly achieving that status. The set he builds is vacant of content but enriched with intent; ‘vacant’ in the sense that his works don’t seem to speak beyond their materiality, ‘enriched’ in the sense that they converge to transcend their materiality to establish a mood. Unlike a new-materialist, who uses the unadorned form to bolster the subjectivity of the object they are presenting, Layo diminishes the identity of his objects and words. The forms of his pieces are perfunctory - more about generating an ambience than revealing something inherent to their material. The draft serves as his final form. Layo crudely obscures surfaces that have nothing on them to reveal. waxing and waning, stuck between deflection and reflection. Nothing is finished, everything is complete.

[winterfrozelifeoutoffall]

I Took a Screenshot of the Whole World

A review of 1001puddles' exhibition at Movie gallery, Nov 2023

This exhibition, and in a way the gallery MOVIE itself, feel like an earnest exercise in externalising an internalised internet of disembodied references. A noodly ebbing and flowing between a desire to generate offline references and the damned proclivity to validate existence through online archiving mechanisms. The archive is used as a life affirming spotlight, authenticating experience through accumulation and serialisation; life did exist, we did do things, they were cool. The bitter irony of trying to validate experience through the past tense is that the future and the present become a field of game hunting. Experiences are tracked down, hunted, hollowed out, taxidermied and stored for future display. Pre-meditating an archive, like prophetic perfect tense, speculates the event before it happens and renders the event complete and done- no longer requiring it to be experienced… running before crawling. The online interconnectedness that fetishises ‘the real’ traps the corporal space we inhabit in a feedback loop that validates the ‘realness’ of its experience through a process of mastication and regurgitation; swallowed and gorged back and forth between online and offline social spaces, until finally being metabolised and excreted into an archive.

1001puddles fills the garage-space-turned-gallery with a sprawling grid of images, covering nearly every available wall. A4 laserjet prints are sheathed in rows of plastic sleeves suspended from curtain rods with fishing wire. The loose symmetry of the grid is just tight enough to create the illusion of uniformity. The hanging images precariously sway in the wind when the garage door is fully open, but are kept from tangling by the perimeter of small sandstones tethering the fishing wire to the ground. In the centre of the gallery lie three medium-sized sandstones which are perforated with small cavities, a handful of thimbles balanced atop and around them. The largest stone has a substantial cavity carved out, and its base is also perforated with holes. The cavities and thimbles are filled with water, or maybe oil. The tiny, artificial bodies of water and the images on the walls don't seem directly linked- although perhaps there is a quiet conversation about distorted reflections. I highlight this connection tentatively because the vastness of subject matter documented in these images makes any claim to pattern recognition feel apophenic and peripheral. Advertising material reflected in the window of a bus; a man crouching near some body of water; a murky reflection of a skyline in a puddle; a curved stick and its shadow connecting into the shape of a love heart; a scrunched up newspaper on the bonnet of a car; a welcome mat ripped in half; a chihuahua in a roller bag; a woman suntanning with her legs stretched out in the air. Puddles’ collection of images relate to each other through an ineffable aesthetic sensibility that is unbound by formal aesthetic principles. The images seem to work towards typifying a style or humour, rather than articulating a pattern. In that sense Puddles’ work is like a never ending scroll, referring to an infinitely growing archive that is substantially greater than the one you are currently seeing. Viewing Puddles’ work triggers an embarrassing sense of non-control. The photography feels heavily geared toward the involuntary, and often inappropriately invasive, nature of sight. The subjects of his lens hang exposed, their strange eccentricities presented candidly, and as a viewer you can't help but feel a little self conscious watching them being watched.

Puddles builds an impenetrable wall through excess and repetition, suffocating every individual moment into a singular experience, flattening the matrix of nodes into a generalised gesture. Individually, the images feel a bit existential; pathologically documenting quotidian banalities along with oddly behaving subjects- though they might not have seemed so remarkable if their strange behaviour wasn’t highlighted. The plurality of banal subjectless imagery reprieves the audience from participating in truly sardonic voyeurism. The dense population of images restrains the viewer through a kind of disarming overstimulation. Excess defies deconstruction.

The existential threat of the interface is its insistence on the user’s responsibility to discern, to choose either this or that, to discriminate and eliminate options, but Puddles obliterates any clear discernment between subjects. There is not even an implication that hard boundaries exist. Puddles blurs, or rather pixelates, the bigger picture. Behind a kind of cool and blunt humour, the crude, the pathetic, the earnest, the beautiful, the stupid and the ugly hide. He refuses to reveal which is which and when one ends and another begins. Obfuscated, nothing can hurt me. His prolific output of imagery has completely humbled the subject, stripping it of agency and spectacle. The concern is no longer what should be documented and exhibited, but how it should be captured and with what it should be stored. The hand and the eye refuse to believe, obscuring life through a stifling screen.

[winterfrozelifeoutoffall]

Angela and the Sorgenkinds

Exhibition text for Chloe and Bel at Asbestos, Sep-Oct 2023

A peculiar show at a peculiar time; Bel and Chloe vaguely slouch towards each other, barely coexisting in the mundane bareness we’ve all been conditioned to laud. Laud because we’re myopic or unoriginal, or maybe just because we actually believe it’s the best we deserve. Horizontality, levelling out a cluttered space, performing vitality to subsist or just get by.

A scene is a stage and all your friends are actors. I don’t know what a picture of Myles in a messy room says to a synaptic bolt of black, Je ne sais quoi. Anabel’s lines are direct but random, her composition sparse but terse. The constellations of spray painted pencils and various brushed pointed ovals miraculously avoid forming any cogent associations, yet somehow straddle the edges of what feel like references. The canvas bears countless little scuffs and marks, colliding and mingling with each other to create united bold features. Negative space is complicated to the point of optical illusion in some points of particularly tremendous tension. The markings feel organic and atmospheric, but not so much as to distract or labour the point of their ambience. Je ne sais quoi, I don’t know. Myopia. I guess we’re on the precipice of change? Post Guzzler, post Meow, post everything that’s happened and hasn’t happened. Post a time that called for something serious, maybe just now gone. Is this show emblematic of some future or some past? Something is being lamented, commiserating a loss of innocence — but it’s not a fresh wound. Not an autopsy, but like a wake or like a birthday. Something is bubbling under the surface. Angst. Commiseration. A ritual for past time and times passed. Pathological or mythological, I don’t know. Myles stares at whatever it is he’s working on, sitting there, kind of awkwardly, and sweetly, on the ground in front of a messy assemblage of musical instruments, art supplies, and general sharehouse clutter. This scene is so familiar it's almost cliché. Chloe has a way of staging people with unconventional stage presences. Maybe it’s just patience, giving her subject the space to sprawl out. Somewhere between rehearsed and spontaneous the image has a blog-ish sensibility, a lived aesthetic is captured in a moment that unveils it and leaves it standing on its own, unadorned and sheepish and embarrassing. The boundary between real and pretend is destroyed when you live life beautifully. The artifice of style is appended to the virtue of truth, but it’s kind of tragic when you catch a glimpse of the fiction in yourself in isolation — the fiction implicit in our outwardly facing personae looks funny and weird when decoupled from the stage it’s normally performed on. Bel and Chloe’s work is expressive, but not self-exclamatory. They are subjects that are not subjected. Auteurs that do not self-mythologise. They are style. They do not mine their subjectivity for content, they are experiencing it expressively. It’s cynical to call bullshit on earnest expression, on tender emotions, even naivety, so if you don’t agree, that’s valid, but at least be real. This world doesn’t happen to them, they just happen in this world. They have Je ne sais quoi. I don’t think they know either. Sometimes you look at a friend in their messy home and something inside you just snaps. Like heartbreak, but kind of joie de vivre. Not every thought has to be complete. Not everyone suffers from their ailments. The opposite of disillusionment is not an illusion. Singular moments punctuate Asbestos with explosive gusto, but quietly, like don’t look away, you might just miss it. An ouroboros in the making, a glottal stop, anxiously waiting to violently rupture a surface like I don’t know. Like I don’t know like I don’t know like the artist’s room is like a little cave of love. Electrifying beauty grips the imagination and just keeps pouring out. This feeling is real, the red is intense, the sunshine heals but it’s blinding. A synapse prunes itself in anticipation of a familiar shock. Change happens slowly. Everything new hurts.