The leaf says “call me”. Another leaf says “me too” while a string of creeper vine spells out the words “thanks for nothing”. It seems as though nature in Bronwyn Rennex’s show Small Fires at Stills Gallery is trying to tell us something, most of it conflicting and emotionally mixed up. Using cyanotypes to create weird two dimensional images – with the ghostly possibility of a third present in the shadows – the images shift uneasily from abstraction into figuration, some works seemingly blank, others overloaded with potential readings. The duotone images also give this stunning suite of works a painterly quality that is quite unexpected and the play between depth and detail is oddly disturbing.
In her last show, Rennex experimented with sequential images, diaristic snaps arranged in cinematic rectangles that both evoked and denied narrative meaning. In Small Fires, the sequences have dissolved into single frames and diptyches that skirt a single reading for something that is more immediate but no less beautiful. Headless, a body holding its own head at arms length, has undeniable topical resonance as well as a strange Biblical and metaphorical angle. Midnight is a startling pink and purple piece that features two shadow puppets (are they ostriches?) facing off and we couldn’t help but imagine them talking to one another.
The text works and the rest of the show seem at first blush quite separate to one another but it was when we thought of how the images were made that it all came together. We find it hard to remember that photography has having an intermediary stage between the taking of the image and the final result. Although photography these days uses a lot of special effects in post production, we are so easily seduced by technique that even radically unreal images seem faintly plausible. With a technique so simple and antiquated, Rennex’s use of cyanotypes seems straight forward and honest. Craig Judd, in the catalogue essay, mentions this when he says that her works have a “fascinating immediacy and authenticity.” We know what he means, but there are special effects going on in these works that are both nostalgic and magical.
In a well chosen companion exhibition, Christine Cornish has a series of works called Threshold. Now it just might be that exhibiting x-rays is a fine art cliché and we know we like them, but exhibiting them is a leap of faith for both the artist and the viewer. There’s nothing wrong with exhibiting them per se, it’s just that as a visual experience we feel like we have seen them a thousand times and you have to do something very special to make them work.
Luckily, Cornish has mostly succeeded and the works make sense when you view a selection of her photography from 1995 upstairs in the gallery’s mezzanine level. Cornish seems fascinated with old photographic processes and as her old work were all gelatin silver prints that looked like they came form the 19th century, the works in Threshold might be from some antique dealer in zoology studies.
These x-rays of animal bones are beautiful to look at – feet, wings, paws, pelvic regions and skulls – with their spooky elongations and non human physiology. The question we wondered was what is the threshold here? Is it the distance between the human and the non human? The threshold between us and them? Perhaps that was the answer but we couldn’t help but think that the way Cornish had posed the x-rays they seemed to suggest that there might be a confusion between what is human and non human, that all the difference is in fact a smoothed out similarity. The reason we like animals is that they are different from us, not the same, and that their behaviour and their minds are alien from us. It would be a pity if Cornish were celebrating animals as a tedious adjunct to our own reality rather than the glorious unknowable otherness that they truly represent.
We’re not sure how we feel about artists using dead animals in their artworks – perhaps if there was a disclaimer saying they had died in their sleep or from old age we’d feel better about it. We voiced that concern to a friend when we saw Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s Zoomorphia show at the MCA in April last year thinking, how dare you line up all those dead frogs – hasn’t anyone mentioned the frog shortage!!? Our friend said “What about Damien Hirst’s shark?” and we had to agree, that was a good use of a dead animal, but it was all in the title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which, regardless of what you think of Hirst’s work, is one of the greatest titles of all time. Of course, you couldn’t have the title without the actual shark in formaldehyde because then it would have just been a stunt.
The latest show by Cardoso is at GrantPirrie and is a much better show than the MCA extravaganza. Although it looks as though it is made up of many of the same works, the current show is a lot more sympathetically hung and lit, allowing for a much more intimate viewing of the pieces. Cardoso takes butterfly wings, frogs, sea horses, starfish and other once-living creatures and arranges them in geometric patterns. Framed in giant semi opaque plastic mountings, the wall works take on a pseudo-scientific air and the reflected light from the gallery tracks shines through the plastic, picking up the tiny details in the butterfly wings. They are both gorgeous and repulsive.
The beauty of the pieces like Butterfly Drawing comes almost entirely from the artist’s selection of material and her arrangement of the wings echoes the structure of molecules, DNA spirals or crystals. Her sculptural installation of dried starfish called Woven Water: Submarine Landscape is a subtle invocation of the ocean but also the geometric arrangement looks like a computer generated frame.
The repulsion lies in the fact that these beautiful objects are made up of dead animals. You may make of that what you will, but we find ourselves confronted by the artist’s apparently blasé invocation of the beauty of nature and her means of achieving it by destroying nature. We don’t normally read catalogue essays but we did notice in the piece by Clare Lewis that the dead creatures were bought from various sources. Perhaps looking for a justification, Lewis made the following claim:
“The absence of water, however, leaves these preserved starfish unsurprisingly dry, and it is with this realisation that their beauty begins to feel ghost-like and melancholy. These animals have been purchased from an Oceanic Gifts company. Farmed for their appeal as quaint seaside curios, they become representative of human indulgence and commodity fetishism.”
It may be that the works are representative of commodity fetishism, but is that the same as actually saying something about commodity fetishism? It seems far too neat a get-out clause that the artist is allowed to use this material without any explanation or justification and, although she did not personally kill any of the animals, saying that they had been bought from some commercial supply company is like saying you hired a contract killer. Oh sure, they’re just nasty invertebrates most of them so why worry – we eat them every day and they look nice arranged on the wall and probably even better in a white wine and butter sauce. We just hope they died in their sleep.
