Exhibitions 2011

“things beyond resemblance” (1)

There seems to be a compelling semblance featured in each artists work. A somewhat strange psychological signifier has been stimulated by an inherent culture and re-defined by a new-founded orientation. A strong interplay of order and disorder, and placement and displacement is undeniably evident. A disruption or an interlude becomes the catalyst. These artists share a resemblance. By addressing different aspects of orientation, they re-examine both the imagined and the observed.

Henri van Noordenburg: Foreigner

Part documentary, part fiction, Henri Van Noordenburg’s threatening and foreign landscapes create a powerful disruptive tension. A momentary space, hinged between darkness and light. Stimulated by cultural memory and its physical manifestation, Noordenburg examines the very notion of how we intercept and manipulate the seemingly natural process of order. Noordenburg’s landscapes traverse both a personal and a public space. Theatrical in tone, he manifests a reality where the inception of our memories may have entered our waking eyes.

The forced use of chiaroscuro drives the narration into an un-defined territory. Descendent from a Romanesque tradition of light and atmosphere, Noordenburg’s reference to the hand as metaphor is at once, seemingly odd and rather self referential. Noordenburg asks to whom does humanity belong to, the land or a culture? Memory is undoubtedly another psychological signifier, which claims identity to a land, and the re-collection of this culture becomes embedded in new terrain. Noordenburg interrupts the idea of naturalism, by using a scalpel as his anchor to control the inclusion or exclusion of what exists in the landscape. He physically scrapes fragments of each image and removes what appears unwanted. The figures in these landscapes appear superimposed as though positioned in the forefront on a stage set, questioning once again, what precedes, the land or the cultural memory.

Damian Dillon: Jailbreak

The “real” estate is questionable in Damian Dillon’s urban simulations. Each narration presents a seemingly non- dissimilar subject matter, with slight variants introduced by hand.

Dillon’s psychological buildings appear isolated from functionality, there are no inhabitants occupying the space, and the only human presence appears through Dillon’s graffiti marks, drawn by hand or manufactured in Photoshop. These satirical applications appear somewhat destructive yet create a strange harmony to the photograph. As the title suggests in, “Jailbreak”, it appears Dillon has hacked into a matrix of some sort or a prohibited territory.

These works are a strange conjuncture of divergent worlds, occupying the same space. One could assume through knowing Dillon’s ancestry that the two worlds intercepting, could possibly well be Ireland and Australia, though as a spectator these buildings appear nothing more than housing estates, becoming a cultural signifier to poverty or a new founded psychological consciousness.

Renata Buziak: Absence

Renata Buziak’s assisted realist reproductions undergo a somewhat strange process of metamorphosis. Buziak extracts everyday objects or botanical specimens and re-contextualises each object onto a cyanotype. The process is somewhat akin to a flatbed scanner, though seemingly a natural process with the assistance of chemical reaction. Objects or negatives are placed onto a material or card, which has been coated with the cyanotype solution, and upon penetration from either the sun, and or a UV lamp, the light transmits the information by staining the fabric.

Buziak’s technique challenges the language of lens base photography, and the relationship between object and light by the inauguration of the natural. The aftermath of the imprinted forms creates a distilling network of structures and patterns. By deploying objects and removing the intended purpose, Buziak re-defines their visual and biological orientation. The fluorescent cyan filter also inadvertently cultivates a new way of perceiving the natural. While retaining an organic presence, these works are strangely erotic and unnerving. Occupying a liminal zone, the works interconnect all life forms, mirroring the cycle of impermanence.

Glen O'Malley and Kellie White: What A Night

A land is intervened by an imagination of trickery. The camera lens never lies yet the manipulation to the aftermath obstructs the real from the imagined. Glen O’Malley strips photography of its authority, and uses light to navigate the seen and the unseen.

His images are light reflections bestowing the human condition. They carry with them both weight and flight. These images unveil a un- revealed anguish. The subjects in fluid motion linger in a transformative state of being. They are caught in flight amid the physical and the non-physical realm.

O’Malley’s subjects become unified with their external landscapes, whether psychological or physical, there is a strange mutation occurring.

Kellie White employs a torch to re-direct the spectator’s gaze towards the illuminated figures. Again, White’s distortion of acute observation, lends itself to an artificial environment, revealing only a restless disposition. White’s two exhibition works are blindingly distinct; yet both environments inadvertently become a limitless space, an infinite dreamscape.

Alana Hampton: Underwaterworld

Alana Hampton’s clever tampering and deconstruction of the natural, is undoubtedly compelling. Her works, hinge at a strange juncture, a melting point where the underworld meets the visible. These works carry sound to the silence. It’s a contemplative space, tracing one of nature’s most powerful forces being the transition of tidal time. To be underwater is to become internal, isolated from sound, and estranged from the human sphere, as we know it. Here Hampton’s narration lends itself to the examination of our internal dialogue void of time, and order. Although alluding to images of rivers, mangrove swamps and nature’s own beasts, Hampton’s fragmentation of the natural seemingly denies the literal.

Her vernacular is intelligent, floating in a world that bridges two aesthetic styles being both the physical and its manifestation. Hampton anchors the spectator into a realm of unknowingness, a powerful intersection that examines nature’s own relationship, the outer and the inner. These works become a romantic mediation.

Ruth Francis, Pat Bolger, Anne Collins: The Natural and Imagined Worlds

Indeed, technologies have challenged the instruction of perceiving reality and altered our inherent dialogue with all forms of life. This transitional orientation has once again manipulated and forced humanity to re-think the order of things. These three artists have come together through a synthesis that inadvertently re-examines the phenomenology of knowledge.

Each artist elucidates concepts, objects and information through an abstraction of the authentic. Ruth Francis examines the fragmentation of information through the delivery of images via the Internet or television. She polarises and distorts the subject matter akin to media’s hyper real representations of the truth. Pat Bolger re-contextualises objects and fragments of nature, and in doing so re-examines their pre-determined occupation. And Anne Collins’s gestural painterly sensibility reflects the underbelly of the human disposition, imprisoned in a world of conformity.

Melissa Amore

(1) Theodor W. Adorno / Hullot -Kentor, R., ‘Things Beyond Resemblance,’ 2006 Columbia University Press.