The door to Multiple Box swings both ways and we found ourselves inside Gallery Barry Keldoulis with Barry Keldoulis right there, walking around, smiling, tidying up glasses from the night before, saying brightly “Hi, I’m right here – if you need me!”
Yes, we said, thank you, and continued to admire the handsome works of Sarah Smuts-Kennedy who wins the award for the best artist’s name we’ve heard in ages. It rolls around on the tongue and is just begging o be used as in conversation, as in, ‘that couch has been Smuts-Kennedy’d!’ or, ‘Hi, I’m just going to Smuts-Kennedy these glasses and I’ll be right with you!’
Smuts-Kennedy has made some rather beautiful photographic works in her show called Ascension. A collection of C-type prints on metallic paper, mounted behind glistening sheets of acrylic, you’d be hard pressed to find works with as much elusive appeal anywhere right now. The works are abstract lines of colour on inky blue and black backdrops, vague and indistinct perspectives that may or may not be clouds, rolling surf or wave lines digitally composited together on large sheets of paper. The works are blank enough to pass for fashionable minimalism but have enough to keep your eye going for some time as you try to decipher what you are looking at.
The Gallery Barry Keldoulis is set out like a maze for this show, and like the little mice we are, we scurried around looking at the works, happy that we had found our conceptual cheese.
