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gallery 1

Deb Taylor and Penelope Hunt

Through the use of text-based work, both Deb Taylor and Penelope Hunt explore contemporary narratives. The work of these two artists examines the contrasts that exist between the public and private arenas negotiated on a daily basis.

Taylor’s work is based on the barcode and is a game of order and disorder. Through the use of bold colour to render the numbers and strips that make up these codes, the work hovers at the cusp of abstraction. The overlapping, repeating and fragmentation of these elements doesn’t completely obscure their original forms but hints at code or communication gone awry.  Amongst this ambiguity a type of order seems possible in the consistent use of square and rectangular formats, which appear as modules that can be moved and replaced.  The imposition of order in the installation of the works appears as an attempt at re-coding the jumbled information.  The arrangements recall maps or diagrams while the components also frame sections of wall into spaces that play a part in the overall composition.

Hunt’s work is concerned for the individual amidst the clutter.  Human-sized scrolls of white paper invite the viewer to contemplate thoughts posed by the use of a single word, statement or question.  These meditative pieces talk about states of mind and enquire whether everything is as it should be, but hint that perhaps it’s not.  Acting like masks, the scrolls cover a more random and chaotic thought process in which definitions have been written directly onto the wall.  These definitions become emotive narratives, which engage in dialogue with the covering paper, only adding to the confusion. 

Hunt’s work is almost monotone and withdrawn, contrasting with Taylor’s work, which is bold and vibrant. Whether dealing with the constant bombardment of advertising or retreating into a private world of thoughts, there is much to process on a day to day basis.

gallery 2

Julie Keating

The art of reversed contact

Julie Keating explores our relationship with the past through meticulously painted representations of antique tools, implements and medical instruments.

The makers of these beautiful objects, often centuries old, lavished on them a care and concern for the aesthetic that belied the often gruesome or rough tasks to which they would be put. Now they have become objects for collectors, preserved as works of art and historical sentiment.

Using a restrained palette, Julie Keating presents these museum pieces with a lyrical dream-like quality. Floating almost imperceptibly against an anodyne background, they seem to ask to be picked up but not quite. The past puts them just out of reach; we no longer have the skill to use them; they can no longer fulfil their maker’s purpose; “museum pieces are not to be touched”.

But these tools are all we have left to represent innumerable acts of making and (surgical) unmaking. 

Each painting on canvas is mounted on highly polished and warmly toned jarrah blocks, able to hang on a wall or stand on a flat surface. Evoking the finely made boxes in which these tools and implements were originally presented by their makers, they also warn us that today boxes preserve and protect what are now precious or cherished implements, adding yet another layer of prophylactic distance between the past and the present.

In Keating’s paintings all human activity may be seen as Art in one way or another. 

gallery 3

Mary Sutherland

Parallel Silences

Parallel Silences is a visual response to the dichotomy that exists in Styx Valley, Tasmania, where fertile old growth forest lives opposite the remains of logged fields.

Mary Sutherland’s small scale paintings are windows into the torn and scarred remains of a punctured land.  Her images of decimation are gently wrapped and protected within thick wax.  Sutherland’s use of wax is to visually and physically distance the viewer from the image, whilst preserving and housing the remains as used in the tradition of religious reliquary.  The inclusion of hospital wristbands suggest the vulnerability and relinquished responsibility exercised when a ‘duty of care’ is necessarily given to another.

Sutherland is also concerned with silence.  Due to poisons and lack of vegetation, few plants or animals survive within the logged areas.  She draws a connection between the silence of the logged areas and the voices of public protest, which are now being muted by legal actions such as “SLAPPS” (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).[1]

Logged areas with their poisoned and hollow stumps offer a stark contrast to the lush, moist forest which exist alongside.  It’s a quiet modus vivendi between the virile greenness of a lush forest as it inhales...beside an exhaling arboreal corpse. 

Mary Sutherland is a Melbourne based artist.  This is her first solo exhibition.

1. Sharon Beder, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, SLAPPs: Coming to a Controversy Near You, Current Affairs Bulletin 72(3), October/November 1995, pp. 22-29.

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