From Rebecca Gallo…
Painting is both subject and medium for Huseyin Sami. In his current exhibition Whispers from a band of Myth Makers at Sarah Cottier Gallery, skins of pastel-hued household paint are stretched over wire and onto canvas. Contrary to painting tradition, wire appears to win out over canvas as the more appropriate support, with its flexibility of form enabling subtle draping and stretching of the skins. Rectangles of stretched canvas are oddly angular under multiple skins of paint that are stretched and bunched like deflated balloons or rumpled curtains. They fail to tessellate or conform to straight edges. At a glance these non-illusionistic works seem impenetrable, but they aren’t hiding anything: the medium is the message.
Similarly in Sarah Mosca’s work in the adjacent gallery, materiality and process trump content, without entirely bypassing it. Mosca proposes new ways for photographic film to record place. Looking at Mosca’s abstract photographs, it’s easy to imagine a landscape in the hints of form and undulating light and shadow. Perhaps that angular contrast is a hazy mountain peak, or this tonal flurry a rushing river. Mosca straps film to her body as she walks through the landscape, so these visual phenomena are more likely to be a rustle of clothing, an imprint of sweat or the transference of body heat. These abstract, experiential and intimate registrations are shown alongside a single image of the landscape itself. It’s interesting to consider what may be a more effective representation of place: the carefully composed snapshot that shows what it looks like, or the poetic and abstract images that portray the physicality of being there.
Until November 14
Sarah Cottier Gallery, Paddington
Pic: Huseyin Sami, Colour Wire Hang (GVPYP), 2015, acrylic on wire, 120 x 80 cm.
