calendario eventi  :: 

X

5/2/2008

Group show

Stills Gallery, Sydney

Stills Gallery's first exhibition of the year features three emerging artists whose works traverse rugged coastlines, mangrove swamps and unsightly urban alleys. Eliza Hutchison, Deb Mansfield and Murray McKeich engage the organic. With an unavoidably Surrealist edge, they each disrupt the age-old belief system that couples Nature with inherent Truth or Goodness. These artists explore the unique aesthetic possibilities of new media and interdisciplinary forms, confusing and contradicting the traditional subject matter of rolling hills and overflowing fruit bowls.

Murray McKeich's signature synthetic aesthetic, a meeting point between the natural and manufactured both in terms of content and process is featured in both print (DVN, 2005) and video (Maddern Square, 2006) in this exhibition. Rotten discarded waste and stubborn weeds, the detritus of modern life, metamorphose via complex generative software into a multitude of unique visual variations that are disarmingly seductive. As McKeich digitally scans his subject material to form an extensive image bank from which the program randomly curates, his influence on the process is both imperative and redundant and raises interesting questions around the notion of artist as agent. The video work mutates and evolves, shifting and dwelling on strange transformations and configurations in a mesmeric visual poetry. However, like the ominous lesson of Frankenstein's monster or the unsettling implications of artificial intelligence, the subtle layering of the man-made and organic belies quietly dark results.

Deb Mansfield's work meditates on moments of transition. Bringing evidence of the exterior into interior settings she examines the point where dichotomy converges, the extraordinary result when disparate elements become more than the sum of parts. Formally too, Mansfield explores the meeting of disciplines, painting and photography, in a pairing that confounds their essential qualities. Her photographic prints have a timeless, painterly quality, while in contrast the photographic frieze produced by 'painting with light' is ethereal in its inevitable transience. In preparation for the exhibition liquid emulsion will be painted directly on the gallery wall, onto which the negative photographic motif of mangroves, the area where land dissolves into sea, will be projected leaving its positive mark.

Eliza Hutchison's most recent body of work The Ghillie 2007, fuses land and performance art with photomontage in a series of epic scapes and humorous theatricality. Exploring the bizarre ritualism of camouflage as the act of becoming ones surroundings, The Ghillie embodies this point of unification with Other, and winks to the phrase 'at one with nature'. Where a mound of grass is at second glance monstrous and a rock appears to levitate in never-ending skies, the uneasy feeling of deja-vu arrives as if from a mis-remembered childhood story or dusty folktale. Hutchison embeds the unnatural within the natural in what alludes to an unsettling fragmented narrative, while her manipulation of form through odd juxtaposition, deceptive cropping and multiple perspectives reassert Surrealist techniques in a contemporary aesthetic.

Stills Gallery Sydney
36 Gosbell Street - Paddington NSW 2021 Sydney
Opening hours: Tues-Sat 11am-6pm
Free admission

stampa

permanent link