From Andrew Frost…
For anyone interested in the origins of Catherine Nelson’s work, her CV makes for some illuminating reading. After graduating from the UNSW College of Fine Arts she worked in visual effects on movies including Moulin Rouge, Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban, 300 and Australia. These films, with their mixture of live action and often stylized digital matting and computer generated imagery, defined the look of contemporary fantasy cinema – a grey world of animated pixels where the layering of imagery looked more painterly than photorealistic. Freed of the need to create special effects for others, Nelson began exhibiting her own large-scale photomontages, an arresting series pieced together into floating eco-planets.
For Other Worlds at Michael Reid, Nelson’s recent work from 2010 to 2013 is featured, and the special effects are once again to the fore. Nelson’s eye-catching motif is the globe, a trope that she explores in a variety of thematic configurations such as season, forest, seascape and pond. The effect of piecing together the images gives the viewer the feeling of floating over an entire planet, or experiencing an extreme fish eye effect, and this floating feeling gives the work a timeless, and almost universal vibe. Gone too is the grey scope of Moulin Rouge and instead we’re treated to the eye candy of intense and unreal colour and the unmistakable of message of ecological fragility.
Until April 27
Michael Reid, Sydney & Berlin.
Pic: Catherine Nelson, Mission II, 2013. Pigment print from digital photograph, 100 x 100cm.
