From Stella Rosa McDonald…
If you were to discover this collection of work at the end of a long winding road or in the shadows of an isolated cave you might mistake it for an arcane map of the universe. Through diverse considerations of matter, space, time, light and sound the objects in Everything & Nothing plot the logic of existence and the measure of life.
Some works are made from the residue of heightened experience while others utilize common materials to express the joy of discovering the shape of the universe in the everyday. Sarah Mosca, while re-tracing the epic walk undertaken by Werner Herzog from Munich to Paris, carried a single sheet of film beneath her clothing, over her heart. Exposed for the length of her three-month walk, the negative compresses physical and emotional time into a single, overexposed frame. John Nixon’s miniature Block Painting (1968), painted the carbon black of burnt toast, alludes to scale on a cosmic level. The legacy of Nixon’s painting is apparent in Gemma Smith’s iridescent Radiant Greige (2010), which attests to the enduring allure of the monochrome in art. The work straddles the space between Smith’s ‘Tangle paintings’ and her early gem-like acrylic sculptures, both of which capitalize on the sculptural potential of colour. Christopher Hanrahan’s graphic Oe (bodies) (2014) and Mikala Dwyer’s Tall hollow (2015) seem almost impossibly sculpted from a void and a transparency. While objets trouves by Matt Hinkley and Koji Ryui are exquisite interpretations of quantum scale. By acknowledging the paradox of the universe Everything & Nothing shows us that it exists at the limits of ourselves, a perimeter that—wonderfully—is always out of reach.
Until July 25
Sarah Cottier Gallery, Paddington
Pic: Everything & Nothing, installation view, image courtesy of Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.
