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Viewing Points II
Thom Buchanan
Gallery 139 - Main Gallery
Magill Road, Stepney
Season closed
Thom Buchanan's urban menageries are a spectacle of fog-cluttered streetlights and brightly lit building behemoths. With a Clarice Beckett-like mystery the streetscapes, with roads curling over one another and trailing into unseen distances, are awash with muted greys or, alternatively, shine with a sharp brightness that pierces the bright blue skies.
In the series of Notes From A Wood Book, city streets disappear under blocks of snow and wisps of white. Thin black ink hints at outlines of roads whilst buildings blend into backgrounds of repetition.
The works speak of displacement and reclamation of the public streets by all sorts of life: birds, bison and lions alike. Streets recoil upon and away from themselves. Serpentine bridges seem to swallow their own tails, creating an infinity of twisted trails. Yet, all the while, there is a sort of muteness in the work, like a silent film playing out in a body of grey light and a romantic Lillian Gish haze.
Buchanan easily shifts between a restrained sort of perfectionism and a loose wash of colours. There is a photographic quality to his brighter, sun-filled works, whilst more wintry scenes become impressions of atmospheric haze pierced by the artificial lights of dusk. The large canvases are immersive, with viewers becoming roadside spectators, whilst smaller wood panels give a sort of high-rise window onto scenes and events taking place below.
'Viewing Points II' is an exploration of imaginary landscapes wherein animals and pedestrians pass by in a casual disregard for one another. In reality, there seems to be two time zones active in the works. One exists in the past, hinting at a natural landscape now lost and a kingdom of animals since displaced. The other is an allegory to our present urban bliss - of windows that reflect a spectrum of colours and doorways and signs that pay homage to a growing metropolis. This duality creates a series of works that are beautiful in their boldness, and act as intriguing inflections of impossible scenes.
Objectives Pending
Contemporary artists
Gallery 139 - Basement Gallery
Magill Road, Stepney
Season closed
'Objectives Pending' is the first showcase of artists in the newly established Gallery 139, under the keen direction of well-known Aboriginal art dealer, Tony Bond.
The basement gallery blends the crisp white of a contemporary art space with patterns of raw, exposed brick. Artworks are set forward from the wall on specially built panels that seem to make every work a feature in itself.
Rohan Fraser's Exile II speaks of silent isolation - an unsettling memento mori in his figures bound by sheets amongst a vast, void landscape. Driller Jet Armstrong's Taking The Liberty gives viewers a painterly Australian landscape imposed upon by the jigsaw hand of that mother of American icons - the Statue Of Liberty. The imposition, like so much of Driller's daubist work, becomes a spectacle in both artistic legislation and post-colonial parody. Such intense works are counterbalanced by the figurative exploration of Talia Wignall's Self Portrait, which seems to float in its own space - a comfortable exploration of the body in loose line work. Like Wignall, Elizabeth Wojciak's expressive portrait The Full Attention creates a sort of edgy movement in the reworking of lines and indistinct layers of colour.
Thomas Brice's photographic Breakfast #3 is an unsettling exploration of a country scene in plastic, whilst Chris Gaston enforces a bold Cubist style to create a plethora of patterns in the acryclic on canvas Automation And Mandolin. The work of Danelle Walpole and Peter Drew are effective in their use of colour as the main arbiter of form, though the softness of Walpole's Allegory I stands in stark contrast to the bold colours and clean lines of Drew's Portrait Of An Intense Young Man.
Marta Lukaszewicz's Earthman print - developed from small pen and ink drawings - becomes a meditative exploration of internalized thought, whilst Ben Searcy finds a sort of accidental abstraction within his photographed scene, creating layers of frames, symbols and figures.
Sum Woon Chow, Eric Meeuwissen and Sarah McDonald each create a moody expression within their abstract oil paintings, whilst Tai Spruyt and Ian McFarland seem to explore a design-like restraint between their repetitive, near-monochromatic works.
Horses play a recurring role within the exhibition, with Evan Bailey's photographic Outlaw and painters Darren McDonald and Mary Wauchope standing in stark contrast to one another in regards to stylistic and conceptual bases.
Will Nolan and Logan MacDonald both seem to have changed their style within the exhibition... Nolan's hand-spliced photographic portraits give way to a series of gift boxes that are deceptive in their pastel-like softness. Logan MacDonald's intricate and absurd ink portraits, alternatively, are balanced by pop-like vessels for poison and liquor alike.
Rossanne Pellegrino's Plastic People - a photographic detail of twisted legs - sits between two square works that seem to reflect one another, despite being vastly different in content and medium. Steve Wilson's photographic work Burt details a dry landscape against a rich blue sky whilst Ben Quici's Pushing Shit Uphill describes a repetitive, monochromatic street scene imposed candidly upon by a hard-working skeleton.
Overall, Gallery 139 is a well-developed space that lends itself to a rich variety of art styles and media. Moreover, the group of artists hand-selected for the upcoming gallery season is one to keep an eye on, with many trailing a string of awards and most proving to be quite unique in their approach to their art practice.
Talia Wignall and Ian McFarland are first cabs off the gallery rank, with shows opening this week.
Image:
Thom Buchanan, Migration, oil on canvas.
Image courtesy the artist and Gallery 139
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