Sydney
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, GrantPirrie
Confidently riding the ‘new realism’ (my sloppy term) surge in painting so prevalent among younger Australian artists are this somewhat older duo (PhDs and academics both), who make large detailed and closely-worked oil paintings which are not quite trompe-l’oeil enough to categorise as hyper-realism, but are skillful enough to render apparently collaged elements in paint. Such commentary on different types of picture-space, common to so much of this ‘genre’, are not in themselves revelatory – some would say just another manifestation of the eternal preoccupation with ‘questioning the act of painting”. However the subject matter, among it a whole series of small canvasses depicting different views of Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’, an elderly Aboriginal woman holding a white baby, and other repreated motifs of no doubt personal significance, burrow down to new layers of possible meaning in a way which I think transcends and extends the ‘plasticity’ of the medium. Though stylistically and conceptually somewhat different, the work evokes for me Tasmanian James Morrison’s remarkable and obsessively painted friezes which seem to narrate both personal and cosmic stories in minituarised ‘history’ or ‘narrative’ paintings that one could well imagine blown up to giant murals, Diego Rivera style.
Rolande Souliere: G&A Studios
G&A is arelatively new ARI, and generally interesting, usually mounting either group or 2-3-person shows across their two large rooms. I was quite taken with Rolande Souliere’s confident intsllations, particularly Materality#2, conisiting of a series of large wall-mounted cylindrical shapes or vessels, with knitted wool insides and and exquisite layering of bird feathers (different kinds on each vessel) on the outside. It didn’t feel necessary to know what they mean – they have an obsessively crafted, ‘ritualised’ quality that had me going back to gaze at them again before leaving. Watch out for Souliere at an ‘emergent’ show at a public gallery soon.
Hany Armonius: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
I’m a fan of Armonius’ ironic and often hilarious pieces, but this show of 3 or 4 small installations/tableaus/machines feels perfunctory and all wrong in the space. Installations need to have a transformative presence that exceed the mere space they occupy, and though the discared sheets of paper from one of the works appear to do this, it is all quite visually dead somehow, and fails to ignite or charge the space with any added resonance or poetics. The same works would be very different no doubt in their own lit and more isolated context. Plonking them all in a white cube, sculpture-style, may be the ironic intention, but the show doesn’t transcend the sum of its (amusing) parts.
Destiny Deacon: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Destiny rides again, with a new show of recent photomedia works titled Totemistical – large prints blown up from snapshots and/or polaroids, defiantly low-resolution and fuzzy, depicting a series of bizarre miniature tableaus often involving dolls, children’s toys, kitsch souvenirs and household items. These are delightfully colourful, even lurid, as if the saturation knob has been turned right up, and feature the usual deadpan and ironic titles, Continuing her ‘documentary’ strand (with Virginia Fraser), featuring the dressing-ups and antics to camera of young Indigenous children within her large extended family, is the short DVD Shark Dreams which, knowing the children a little over the years, I found fascinating.
Capricornia: Belvoir Street Theatre
To Belvoir on Cleveland (the soul-less Seymour Centre) for Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, adapted 2 decades ago from the famous Xavier Herbert novel of class, race and tragedy in a semi mythical top-end town of Port Zodiac (Darwin). Though long, Wesley Enoch’s simple staging keeps the narrative moving along at a good pace, and good acting, particularly from Luke Carroll as the the main protagonist (the mixed-race Norman Shillingworth) carries it the rest of the way home. Ursula Yovich as the feisty mission-girl ‘Tokkie’ is also a stand-out. There aren’t too many plays where Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky rubs shoulders with a traditional Indigenous language, and I liked the non-didactic way in which numerous themes very relevant to Australia now are woven together in a piece of good storytelling.
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