From Andrew Frost…
It often feels that non-objective abstract art is in a Sargasso Sea of over familiarity. Artists produce endless variations on the art of the last century that, while visually appealing and entirely reasonable within the context of the artist’s practices, those works of squares, rectangles, lines and blocks of colour don’t really represent a serious advance on anything that’s been done before. Ernest Edmonds’s exhibition Light Logic has the familiar appearance of geometric abstraction but it’s an interactive new media exhibition that reconfigures itself depending on the movements of visitors in the gallery.
The key work of the show is the installation Shaping Space. The work generates its colour and form by following a set of prescribed rules that, while taking a feed from a camera, calculates the amount of activity in front of the work. This activity in turn modifies the rules and thus the visual evolution of the work. A set of acrylic paintings on canvas captures moments in the process of the installation. In essence the installation restates the kind of formal rules that artists who make non-objective art create for themselves to produce their art, but with a direct feedback from the outside world into the creation of a single work, suddenly it feels as if the genre is alive once more.
Until July 13
Conny Dietzschold Gallery, East Sydney
Pic: Ernest Edmonds, Shaping Space, 2012. Computer generated interactive installation, 235x370cm. Courtesy Conny Dietzschold Gallery and the artist.
