SHIMMER

In SHIMMER curator Mimi Kelly has brought together a group of five emerging Adelaide based artists to create a group show that is a seductive and subversive exploration of mediums and textures and the psychological relationships they arouse. The artworks in this show are engaged in a dialogue of secrecy, human interaction, desire and trauma, with each artist utilising their chosen medium to illicit the fundamental human desires to gaze, to touch and to want. The medium of surface matters here, and rich opalescent colours, glossy finishes and rough edges are the style de jour. Shimmer evokes something beautiful that is fleeting, or something that radiates passively, so you will not see any gaudy or shock value artwork here. Kelly, I think, values a more subdued and understated seduction, and the viewer participation that happens slowly and thoughtfully. What at first seems like quite a stark and aloof presentation, the curation reveals itself to be a balancing of strengths and weaknesses and of partnership and opposition between individual works.

The elongated reclining twins Snow White I and Snow White II are sculptural perfection, pure white abstract forms they glisten as if they had suddenly emerged from underwater. There is a sort of clinical precision to these sculptures, stark and clean they remind me of bones or teeth. There is something not right though, about these highly stylised forms, they are so perfect with their fairytale monikers but what is their possible function? They are decadent in their abstraction. I appreciate the duality here between the clean and pure and the slightly dangerous implications of function. All gleans purity on the outside but all rotten and dark inside. Lovely.

Bianca Barling's video installation is titled Forever which is a very heavy sort of name especially when placed against the performance which is separated on the two screens, and where two characters play out a pas de deux without ever connecting. I am drawn in by the sumptuous visuals of the highly theatrical sets, and the rich colour, and can see these characters seated here, performing romantic ideals. Barling's characters seem to be caught in a cycle of communication, of longing and frustration, where there is action and reaction between the character's movements, but yet their longing is left unresolved. I see desire manifesting as violence, set to a soundtrack that is ebbing softly, which amplifies the duration of their movements and yet never allows the climax of physical connection.


Bianca Barling Forever Video Still 2004

Which is where we take a little divergence to a work which is a performance of physicality and connection. Sarah crowEST's video installation is entitled Globe for Strolling and features a playful and somewhat absurd performance which is played out by a girl with a large globe encased on her head rolling another large globe through urban spaces. We watch as she takes the globe on a walk, and is both in control and controlled by the globe. The performance speaks of spacial interaction but also a more personal interaction if we imagine the globe as another person. It is satisfying to see that the globe from the performance video is situated in the gallery and I am surprised when I start to roll it that it is heavy and filled with what sound like small beads, and being able to feel the weight and audibility of the globe lends a new reading to the performance.

Laced the painting series of Christian Lock are luscious and almost edible. Lock has created images that verge on energetic restlessness in some panels to moodier and more serious tones in others. They are viscous, abstract, sexy, energetic, techy and dangerous. Lock employs colour exceptionally well and I am particularly drawn to the black panel, the masculine Kingswood Black vs Rock Boy. In this one I seem to melt into the surface, and I feel a possibility of violence oozing from behind the smears of black paint, moving slightly reveals glints of red, like a spreading sickness. Situated just below is a white panel, the visual opposite The Traveller which is all surface, sombre and cautionary. The large red Ghost in the Machine is like data mapped in terrains of holograms and wickedly sensual paint almost dripping beneath the highly polished surface.


Christian Lock Laced Detail 2003-4

Sleeper Hold is Clint Woodger's video piece that reveals the beauty behind destruction and trauma. His video contains clips from popular films, edited to show bombs exploding and fires spreading, and large-scale destruction. But there is beauty to be found in the inferno, like in the car-crash we cannot help but watch and be mesmerised by the destruction, and the constant repetition and looping of the clips creates a luscious atmosphere where we find beauty in terror. With the sound removed the aggressive images become passive and aesthetically pleasing, and the viewer is caught in a dreamlike suspension at the momentary act of destruction. The title Sleeper Hold evokes this capturing of the viewer in the duration of destruction. Woodger's work reads well with Kant's theory of the sublime as a sensory excess with a sense of terror at the prevalent.

Careful examination of the exhibition reveals the considerations of Kelly and her chosen artists to bring together works that are intended to communicate individually but at the same time engage in a greater dialogue. There is a lot of visual similarities in the works both tactile and aesthetic and the ideas represented in each individual work are both supported and challenged by the other works presented. A second viewing is highly encouraged.

SHIMMER is at Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, King William Rd until 27 February 2005.





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