From Stella Rosa McDonald…
Against a degree of blindness borrows its form from literary theory, in particular from three writers whose work pursues its own making: Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Hélène Cixous. Comparably, the three artists in this exhibition — as curator Isobel Parker-Philip notes in her accompanying essay — also turn process into form. Parker-Phillip’s curation brings to mind an onion, whose every layer hides another layer underneath. And the works themselves—through their shared interest in materiality—have a transparency, so that it’s possible to see each one in the other. In Against a degree of blindness, the medium is the message.
Del Lumanta’s subject is also her method; by treating printing as a process of repetitive mark making she draws out three dimensions from a two-dimensional form. Her sculptural works act as contemporary palimpsests, where the processes of erasure and addition are left visible in the final document. Draped, hung and laid throughout the space, her sculptural screenprints also function as texts. Anna John’s ceramics similarly play with the multiplicity of a single medium. In Hot dogs, glazed raku stoneware has been fused to a ceramic floor tile and—in keeping with the literary premise of the curation — the work straddles both poetry and prose. Justine Varga’s photographs document the act of photography itself. A series of framed photographic contact sheets capture light in the shape of a room. In the context of this restrained show, Varga’s images are cast as explicit, even violent; rupturing the methodology of photography to show the exact moment where the light floods in. In all of the works in this exhibition there is a shared sense of economy, as if each one has been barely touched by the artists, so that the materials can articulate their own origins.
Until August 16
Mop Gallery, Chippendale
Pic: Del Lumanta, Untitled, 2015. Screen print on paper, steel rod. Photo credit: Docqment
