Deepening the Game

16 September - 9 October 2010

An exhibition curated by gallery artists

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SELYWN RODDA

The term ‘hypnagogic’ was coined by the 19th century French psychologist L. F. Maury. Broadly speaking, hypnagogic cognition is characterised by heightened suggestibility, illogic and a fluid association of ideas. Hypnagogia is one of the most fascinating altered states of consciousness we can experience without the use of drugs. It is usually experienced on the threshhold between wakefulness and sleep, where an object might be experienced as one thing, while simultaneously being experienced as something else altogether; or an object might be ‘visualised’ as a sound, for instance, and vice versa. In Selwyn Rodda’s suite of lush paintings we are presented with a weird hypnagogic world, at once oddly familiar yet intensely alien. Biomorphic structures emerge from etiolated, barren landscapes. Caught in mid-metamorphosis, these forms appear to be seething and pulsating within their fabulous skins. These are mind-forms; the product of an imagination given full-reign; objects redolent of the strange possibilities that this stream of consciousness approach has to offer. Rodda invites us to travel along what Jung called ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. It is a bitter-sweet journey.

Because none of the forms appears to have reached stasis, we are compelled to imagine what has immediately preceded, and what will immediately follow the view with which we are presented. Bathed in sickly-sweet, yet poisonous colours, these are crepuscular forms, which belong to a bizarre nether world. Neither wholly benign, nor totally malignant, they invite us to project our own meanings onto them: are they perhaps reminiscent of body parts, or wounds, or flora and/or fauna, or rock formations? These phallic-faecal-gelati forms have called themselves into existence via the medium of the painter. Rodda has a wonderful understanding of paint and of colour. His fashioning of these forms is entirely at the service of their strange demands; whether crusty, slimy, wet or dry. They are probably as near as we can hope to get to a two-dimensional depiction of hypnagogic manifestations.

STEVE COX 2010

ZOFIA NOWICKA

There is an acute emphasis on the ‘unmediated moment’ captured in Zofia Nowicka’s At the Venetian – Macau 2010. As in her previous photographic series, Framing the Spectacle: Leonard Cohen Concert Melbourne 2009, the viewer again becomes a central participant within the event.  Here, at the Venetian casino, one becomes aware of the collective intensity of each gambler’s focus on the game ‘in hand’.  Amidst the flickering pulse of light from the consoles’ screen-graphic ‘bling’, what is captured is a darkly sensuous atmosphere of condensed excess, pleasure and apprehension.

Critical to an understanding of her images is the way in which Zofia Nowicka defines her ‘point of view’, as being immersed in the crowd: the observer being observed.  There is, for the spectator, as for the scene’s participants, a palpable sensation of being enfolded within the architectureof the event.  What is captured and reflected back to us in these images is the informal poetry inherent in the common ‘rituals’ of ordinary life.

Of particular interest to me is the way in which these works aesthetically cut across historical distance. We are reminded, by these lush, twenty-first century scenes, of the fabulous extravagance of visual textures and the compositional proportions of the historic Baroque.  

Approaching her subject with the ‘eye’ of a painter and the ‘touch’ of the sculptor, the material abundance associated with Baroque ‘style’ finds resonance in the way Zofia Nowicka’s  compositions appear to flood outwards beyond the limits of the frame.  One’s sense of spatial breadth, so palpably captured across the floor of the casino, is nevertheless arrested by the desire to look and look again.  We feel compelled to linger on amesmerising infinity of luminous detail, which creates in its intensity, a spectral, visual staccato of simultaneous ‘moments in action’, snared within the chiaroscuro shadow-play of the Venetian’s crowded gaming floor.

JANENNE EATON 2010

JESSICA WRIGHT

It is a pleasure to observe a young artist tackling the activity of painting, the activity so interminably pronounced dead yet still engaging so many younger artists as an area of fertile research.

Referring to her artistic concerns as being of archetypes, stories, fabulation, and sensations, Jessica Wright's complex works are accretive explorations, into the behaviour of paint as a three-dimensional element; accumulations of inchoate drips, dribbles, striations and nodules; yet underpinning this illusion of uncontrolled activity there is a balanced palette and a mastery of the usage of paint.

Wright speaks of the creation of her work as being "a conversation between convergent compositional forces: they are the experience, not its signifier." Declaring herself a "sensualist in painting and sculpture" she states that "the material that makes a work has a fundamentally provocative role", thereby rejecting illusionism for an actionist process, an experiment often repeated, with often unforseen outcomes: "the artist is not present, but rather the object is a record of presence, the experience of its making."

HILARIE MAIS 2010

JACOBUS CAPONE

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Capone lives in Perth, Western Australia, and makes durational performance works that embrace futility, pointlessness and moments gone. More recently he has dedicated himself to perfecting the art of abstinence. His performances have included ‘work for an unamed island’ (23 Oct 2006), a durational performance from sunrise to sunset; ‘disquiet’, a 144-hour durational performance (19th-25th April 2009) and an action titled ‘to love’ (2007).

In this action a small amount of water was taken from the body of the Indian Ocean and held through the duration of a 147-day walk from Perth to Wollongong. Here the water was poured into the body of its ‘other self’, the Pacific Ocean.

This work, says Capone, ‘ended whoever I once was.’

In August 2009 he performed a series of actions titled ‘directions for body’. These actions took place over nine days both in the suburbs and the city of Adelaide as well as at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation*.

The set of instructions read as follows:

1. wake at first light, take a polaroid photograph of first glimpse of the sun; do not wait to see it develop but instead tape it to the left side of chest, exposure side facing skin.

2. promise self to keep interaction with others to a minimum, then set off barefoot to find a bland, grassy space; pay attention to how the ground feels.

3. once a suitable site is found begin picking individual strands of grass.

4. farewell chosen space and make way back to AEAF.

5. once there individually tape each individual strand of grass to wall and/or floor.

6. outline each individual strand in lead pencil.

7. once AEAF closes and the sun sets remove photograph from chest; cover exposure with gold leaf and place next to taped grass.

8. rest.

9. repeat process for next day.

Jacobus Capone manages to increasingly integrate all action, however perceived by others, into the wholeness of one lived experience. Consequently, more than any artist I know, he encompasses both the minutiae and the broader sweeps of Prince Siddhartha’s last message: ‘all effort is transitory; strive unremittingly’.

DOMENICO DE CLARIO 2010

*as part of the AEAF time-based multi-artist event titled ‘gone in no time/gone in no time’.