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4/11/2008

Two solo shows

Stills Gallery, Sydney

Paul Adair Three-Hole Mountain Inn

Paul Adair creates images that appear full of promise and perfection. Upon closer inspection we see the perfection come unstuck. Each photograph's precise formal composition gives way to the crudeness of his self-made constructions. Adair's works epitomize the disappointment and mediocrity that are the flipside of hope and fantasy, comparing the visual to an experience - like the embellishment of a theme park or photographs on a fast-food menu.

Three-Hole Mountain Inn follows a similar process to Decoy (Stills 2007), where Adair physically constructs all of his sets and props before photographing them. The method of re-creating and re-presenting objects has become integral to developing his practice and continues his interest in the relationship between sculpture and photography.

Making its way down the sterile steps of an empty swimming a glowing orange basketball is frozen mid-bounce. A strange scenario. But the stillness of Basketball belies its false truth and the barely perceptible fine lines of hanging wire tell the real story; it is not just suspended in time but in space. This ball's impending impact never happened; if this pool were filled with water its walls would soften and sag, the perfectly aligned tiles would slide out of place, undone by giving-way UHU glue. Like a glimpse behind-the-scenes at a movie shoot, when the magic of cinematic illusion momentarily becomes the banal reality of booms and blue screen, Adair leaves us hanging too, suspended in disbelief.

This exhibition sees Adair experiment with the installation of his large-scale colour photographs, emphasising a space or a place where the objects become something other than themselves.

Paul Adair (b. Australia, 1982) graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2005. Since 2003 he has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. In 2007 he was awarded an Australia Council studio residency in Los Angeles, which he will undertake in early 2009. This is Paul Adair's first solo exhibition with Stills Gallery.

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Martin Smith
in response to knowing when something is finished

Martin Smith's artwork focuses on those small moments that glance into a life. In response to knowing when something is finished contains reflections on the lives of others, rather than Smith's earlier work, where his own subjectivity was central. He tends to gather photographs as opposed to taking them and as a consequence his works offer wry observations rather than grand statements. The loss or absence inherent in photographic images, which are suggestive of another time and place, is echoed in the physical loss of the words cut into the surface of the works. One story is inscribed on another, just like one memory is laid upon another or one version of a story embellishes another. The resulting works are replete with the same ambiguity, melancholy and richness as memory.

In these elegiac works Smith disrupts the authority of the photograph. The impetus to alter the surface of the works came from him feeling that the images weren't finished. They were like open-ended questions, which needed to be answered. The time it takes to meticulously carve a story, letter by letter, out of a photograph also disrupts the essence of photographic time. In Smith's works, the 'snap' of a camera is paired with this laborious technique. Perhaps to suggest that although photographs take an instant to make, they are only in the present for a moment, they are full of the past and the future.

This first exhibition of Martin Smith's work at Stills Gallery coincides with the release of the QCP monograph on his work Martin Smith photographs - in response to... which will be launched at the opening. Smith's works have been exhibited regularly both in Australia and overseas. In 2007 he was included in Primavera at the MCA Sydney. His works are held in the collections of Queensland Art Gallery, Monash City Gallery and Artbank.

It is strange what we forget and what we remember, what runs and reruns in our minds and what vanishes as if it never occurred. Within everyday reflections we can read the impact that apparently inconsequential moments have on life; when one tentative glance turns into a love affair of 7 years, or an exchange of orphans results in surviving the holocaust. These are the 'scars' that etch our memory, that define who we are.


Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street Paddington - Sydney
Free admission

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