Bob Dylan, Nat King Cole, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Mozart, The Smiths, Mendelssohn, Frank Zappa are but a few of the names present in Bob Mercer’s exhibition “Recollections” a series of images portraying stacks of now defunct LP record covers.

Looking at the spines of these record covers it is not hard to imagine the days when looking at someone’s bookshelf was the accepted social ritual of uncovering a person’s most private interests or even secrets. Looking at these shelves, lives became vignettes of common experiences making us witnesses and participants of the life and hopes of our host.

LP’s hold a relationship to reality that seems to escape any attempt to order them, they become a labyrinth, a container of memories and interconnected narratives living in the object and the viewers’ perception of its content alike.

For Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges libraries were the containers of realities lived, dreamed or even paradoxically yet to be lived or dreamed. In his works, Bob Mercer alludes to a similar obsession by creating spaces between the stacks for us to fill the gaps or re-arrange our own hierarchy of memories. While the work addresses issues of the nature of collecting, more importantly the content eventually can only lead us back to the citadel of our own recollections, of our own dreams.

While listening to one of Mozart symphonies, it’s not hard to wonder why we so readily accept in music the re-play or re-enactment of a work that has already being recorded. The answer can be found in the idea of authenticity or in the incapacity for a recording to reproduce the original; yet in the visual arts such a rare thing can be at best be called referential or at worst plagiarism. Our obsession with the new in visual arts has removed from our vocabulary the reverence to the past in favour of a simple footnote to the “oldies” and as such our visual literacy sometimes suffers from historical myopia.

It is in this vein that the work of Andrew Hodges becomes refreshing. Just as a virtuoso violinist brings renewed life to a ripened score, the images of New York in this series are a homage that encompasses the tradition of Walker Evans with a clear note of respect for Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Taken from 2001 to 2004 these images ironically titled “Signs of Life” seek out an oasis of silence in the discordance of a large metropolis. The compositional use of shadow isolates individual figures underscored by a strong sense of framing and atmosphere. The diversity of point of view heightens the sense of scale and isolation, yet the work remains suspended in time, ultimately giving us a gentle performance to settle such an old “score” as New York is.

In the series “Half Cocked” artist Paula Mahoney uses her own rather charming debutant photographs as a basis to create collages where the sitters become veiled figures dressed in traditional Muslim attire.

Using patterns we associate with romantic notions of our past and the classical framework of the portraits, she emphasises the dichotomy of two forms of dress associated with the delights of a polite and conservative society. These two representations feed equally from notions of a rustic past and a memorial idealisation of “the old times” yet they represent as well the growth of increasingly intolerant and conservative societies.

The overlay of the collage further accentuates the loss of identity of the sitter encasing it in its two costumes as if comically asphyxiated by the loss of freedom created by both social disguises.

This juxtaposition of two traditional symbols of femininity at a time of increased political orthodoxy become a mirror to our own conventions; it makes us question the assumptions we create about others and in an ironic way about ourselves.

In Katrin Koenning’s group of Polaroid transfers she uses the flexibility of the medium to great effect creating imaginary landscapes overlapping European and Australian spaces.
The use of this material creates a quasi-painterly surface giving the images a whimsical quality part dream, part fantasy whilst the colours seem to expand outside of the contours of the objects represented. The overlapping of the two geographies creates a metaphorical space where the play of migrations is represented in a romantic and tender way making her images a dwelling for her memories and ours too.