From Carrie Miller…
It’s common in the art world for artists to become couples; it’s also common to think of these relationships in negative terms. There’s the well-rehearsed story of female partners subordinating their practices to their male counterparts; it’s also customary for competition and resentment over success to undermine these couplings. In (Two) Art presents these couples in more productive terms. Sixty artists are included in the show, including Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, Wendy Sharpe and Bernard Ollis, Alun-Leach-Jones and Nola Jones, Max Cullen and Margarita Georgiadis, David Fairbairn and Suzanne Archer and Rick Amor and Meg Williams.
Obviously a show curated around this premise will vary in quality. But where it takes up this slack is in offering the viewer a chance to make connections, imagined, projected or actual, between the works of the related artists, despite what are sometimes on the surface very divergent practices.
Fairbairn claims that he and Archer believe “that the absolute priority in our lives is making art. Working alongside another creative person who also shares that obsession is the best combination”. This hardly fits with the dominant Lee Krasner/Jackson Pollock myth, but it typifies the more productive nature of these pairings, both in life and art.
Until August 12
S.H. Ervin Gallery, The Rocks
Pic: [Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne]
Funny you write about this – today when I was chatting with an acquaintance she had strong feelings about the subject. Paraphrased it went a little like this:
“What is it about architects? Two architects coming together? It’s like incest!”
I have no idea what she was talking about. The only people that can solidly understand where an architect is coming from with his/her long studio hours and obsession with building materials or details is a architect.
There must be something I missed in her bitter rant… however hilarious.