Three Exhibitions as Part of the Shimmer Photographic Festival
- Ross MacNaughtan Socially Distant
- Gee Greenslade Moon
- Colin Rivers Banal Marie
Fleurieu Art House, MacLaren Vale, September 11 - October 11 2020
Any artist working in 2020 has dealt with what I will euphemistically term “the troubles.”
But how to react to this? Eyes, haunted and fretful over a mask? Empty streets? Please - do me a favour.
Fortunately these three artists do not beat us over the head with rolled-up cliché, but offer instead fresh, inventive work that dances around the virus in different but complementary ways.
Ross MacNaugtan’s exhibition Socially Distant takes screen shots of the ubiquitous web cam hookup and presents them captured on rollfilm and printed big. The scale of the work far exceeds that of the original screen and, thus magnified, the quantum of communication - the pixel - becomes a visual element of the work.
If this were as far as it went we’d have visually interesting images that nod to a time of separation, but MacNaughtan gives us more than that.
We have also an examination of the nature of portraiture; the cooperation that exists between artist and sitter. These faces, although candid, are aware that they are on display. The frame-in-frame of the Zoom meeting has made us aware that our ticks, our rubbings of the chin, our shufflings at the desk are all part of how we present ourselves to the world.
We also have a literal screen placed between ourselves and these subjects. Of course this is also true of more traditional portraiture, but that has become so familiar as to become invisible. By adding the extra layer of the web cam, this separation becomes visible again. And this leads us to what is perhaps the most satisfying and successful aspect of the exhibition. In these portraits we are shown anew the necessity of human communication, as MacNaughtan demonstrates to us the need that we humans feel to reach out and connect with one another.
In the adjacent gallery Gee Greenslade, in her exhibition Moon, invites us to wander through the remarkably articulate chaos that she inhabits. In Greenslade’s world everything speaks, but not in quite the language we’re used to. Light is not just light. Here the visible spectrum extends in to the dangerous far ultraviolet; gentle beams of moonlight now require protective clothing. We are dwarfed by butterfly pupae towering above us on the wall. A small bottle with the tag “Drink Me” would not be out of place here, but this rabbit hole uses optics rather than tunnels to transport us. While remaining alone in the garden of her house, Greenslade leads us through the barrel of a microscope to another world - to the moon, perhaps.
But this world is also one created by an artist with an acute awareness of contemporary photographic practice. In showing us her world, Greenslade is also commenting on the differences between what you see here and what you’ll find in an AIPP print competition. She also has an unruly gift of barely-contained eloquence. When part of the exhibition detached itself from the gallery wall she reworked it in to a new physical form and wrote a blog post of the experience that has already taken her exhibition on to the next phase of its existence. Just as we’re all “a long time dead,” any exhibition is a long time over. By creating a blog post that is in itself a work of art Greenslade has deftly given her exhibition an indefinitely extended life.
In the main hall of the space is Colin Rivers’ exhibition Banal Marie. “Well, I had to think about something while I was pushing the mower,” he said in his artist talk, as if to excuse the depth of thought that is apparent in this installation. A play on both bánh mì and bain-marie, this work documents the colourful exteriors, interiors and proprietors of the often Vietnamese fast-food joints that fuel a legion of suburban workers daily.
The photography is straight-up documentary; saturated colours, subjects conventionally framed and posed in their workplaces. Where it gets interesting is in the complex relationships between the interiors and exteriors, photographer and subject, the beauty of of the jarring signage and menu typography. He has used this work to create a very cleverly laid-out zine which - without any written narrative - tells a complex and fascinating story.
While it is the furthest removed from a virus narrative, this show harkens to the future of exhibitions. All Shimmer artists were told they would need to act and react quickly in response to possible changes to rules and guidelines. Would the shows be real or virtual? What would conditions inside venues be like? As we all know, “the world has changed.”
Rivers has done a very contemporary thing. He has used a subset of the work - seen as a whole in his published zine - to make a site-specific installation for Shimmer. The core of the work remains in tact in the zine and acts both as a catalogue and as a work in itself. Modest in its production, it allows the artist to engage with a wide audience for a reasonable outlay. This body of work can now be reprised in many forms on different scales as the situation and finances dictate.
Putting these three artists in one venue serves both the artists and their audience. The shows seem to jostle and riff off one another, and as the viewer moves between them more is revealed with each pass.
Credits:
Header image: Untitled - Ross MacNaughtan. Text: David Hume. All images are Copyright of the artists and are reproduced here for the purpose of review.