FERRET 3
Beyond
busyness, trouser bulges, politics and portability:
a
progressive dialogue
This
piece of writing is a progressive dialogue between the writers Elizabeth Rankin
and Lisa Sharp, which took place not in real time but in the remembered space
of the FERRET 2 and 3 Exhibitions, visited by them both, though at different
times. ER is Elizabeth
Rankin and LS is Lisa
Sharp,.
ER: Ferrets were
creatures of discomfort and as such truly the creatures of art.
LS: Discomfort in art, as you so colourfully
and metaphorically point out can take the form of visual discord in works of art.
ER: Bulges
appeared and disappeared in the trouser fabric. The discomfort produced erratic
movements and the true purpose of a ferret was revealed not just to be just
busy but to create mischief…
LS: More than visual then, but a haptic
dance. A felt itch, inside the trousers. Mischief, erraticism and trousers have
certainly been the subject of much media commentary in Federal politics this
week. Yet apparently it was also a week in which the arts was on the agenda for
the first sitting week of Parliament. The Minister for the Arts happened to
make this statement and it was not so widely reported:
“The arts should be provocative and
disruptive and even on occasion outrageous.”
– Arts Minister Mitch
Fifield.[i]
The occasion of the FERRET 3 exhibition is an
opportunity to test these assertions.
ER: Sue Callanan’s
work, Filling the Cavity of Time creates
both a new ‘wall’ and a landscape of the mundane in a space in the back of the
gallery. The beauty of this softly architectural piece is the reversal of our
anticipation of a wall - here all is transparent, irregular and muted.
LS: Nearby is Simone Griffin’s Cloud Cover a work that also invokes the
architectural, but this time by bringing architecture in the form of a shelter
into the gallery space. It invokes, through a taut-stretched A-frame (digital
prints on lycra), tethered via fencing wire to bricks, the spatial memory of a
tent pegged in an open field.
LS: Damian Dillon’s work Pop will eat itself stands, no, leans against the wall for support,
its sturdy little Lego legs brightly (but not really) holding up a plywood
support on which are awkwardly taped and pictorially blurred images, seeming landscapes
perhaps. The whole assemblage seems precarious, yet this is undercut by a
series of deliberate choices in its placement within the gallery space.
LS: Also taped, but to the wall and onto the
ground outside is another serial iteration of landscape representation with
Renay Pepita / RAW Contemporary’s Untitled
works. The location (above the back stairs and in the back lane access
area), in spaces that are easily overlooked, the negotiable scale and the use
of caution tape are aspects which lend transience and a poignancy to the work,
which maps Eora nation stolen ground through a dimensional reference to 26
January.
ER:
Elizabeth Rankin’s Scream (2017) is an oil on industrial plastic drawing
of a distorted male face. A largish rectangle loosely hung on two pins; the
work directly portrays human emotion.
The image is smeared but the face is menacing in its distress.
ER:
Far less meandering is Margaret Roberts’ Everyone can be a site
specific artist (43 Junior Street
).This is a quite
disciplined echo of the fence belonging to 43 Junior St,Leichhardt. It’s all
about line, lines of white string attached to tacks.
LS: The titling is as a call to a communal
witnessing and just after 1pm the following Saturday, a small group of us
accompanies the artist to a visit of the original. Once on the street outside
the gallery space, we begin with recognition of the form as seen on the gallery
wall but move on to discuss nuances of meaning – the fence is of steel, not
timber, and has a twin form, regularising and reinforcing this home’s street
presentation. The disruptive relationship between the ‘real’ in the street and
the representation in the gallery deepens in complexity and convolution.
LS: Another work playing upon the
relationship between the real and the representative is Jeff Wood’s Monty the Paper Robot. This little
fallible simulacrum on a cardboard Doric column confounds, and thus disrupts,
our expectations of the robotic. Rather than a technological future, the
artist’s reference is of childhood memory.
LS: The outwardly benign appearance of an all-white
water tap adjacent to Roberts’ fence work leads us into another work, and the
world of water politics. Sandra Smith’s 5-Litre
I and II utilise solid concrete
casts to represent a measure of water: the Cape Town household allocation of 5
litres, a precious and precarious commodity.
LS: In the darkened wedge of space under the
stairs are two works referencing and translating that space’s definition by
bricks and darkness.
ER: The work of
Tamsin Salehian Shadow is a small
irregular sculpture of stacked bricks lit by red and green spotlights. The
effect of the work depends upon its use of both colour and the play of
intersecting shadows. Sarah Newell’s long installation unstable architecture is a complex multi piece of mini plywood shelves
interspersed with quaint little pots of succulents.
LS: At the front of the gallery is an
eye-catching tangle of yellow metal. Facing the street in a recently all-too
familiar streetscape re-presented, Isaac Nixon’s OF[f c]O[urse] presents O bikes as art objects, removed from
utility and exposed as formal elements.
ER: On the
opposite wall Raymond Matthews’ installation
The Bending of Light forms a smaller and rather more irregular (sculpture)
as shapes of moulded plastic pieces tumble down the wall to the floor of the
gallery.
LS: From a tumble to a rain of blue, Opie’s
ceramic installation Falling Down,
Getting Up is a suspended shower of hand-holdable droplet shapes, pooled on
the floor beneath. Glazed in a variety of blues, the work is a fractured,
moving monochrome. ‘Stand in the rain,
stand in your pain, it will fall, dry and be gone’ counsels Opie.
LS: Elsewhere and everywhere are a series of
small-scaled works whose positions are not fixed. Instead they move, appearing
and re-appearing in different contexts, courtesy of unseen agents. Alycia
Moffat’s works Misplaced / Displaced are
a series of 5 brightly patterned textiles, at the scale of a personal item of
clothing; a scarf, tie or sock perhaps. Intended to represent buk choy leaves, they
are a commentary on personal feelings of displacement and belonging. Similarly,
Fiona Kemp’s floor-based works, Untitled
are unsettling, and were in different locations each time I visited.
ER:
a rather sneaky floor work (these) are plastic sculptural brain parts with
curious horse hair tails. They are very disturbing as the combination of
materials might well be but they amuse as well. Will they scuttle away and hide
in a corner of the gallery?
LS: Speaking of hiding, somewhere in the
space was a work I missed completely. Initially dismayed, on reading the Room
Sheet later I find that this was ultimately successful on its part, for “this work is an experiment in how we hide,
and what outlines are still visible.” Sarah Woodward had placed a small,
mute effigy somewhere in the gallery, plaintively wrapped in plastic, I
discover from her Instagram account.
ER: The gallery
levels are linked by the long strips of cloth hanging in a column drop from one
level to another. This soaring work is the installation of Laine Hogarty and is
aptly named antidote for worry and indeed it
is.
LS: Swept upstairs by hope, there is space to
breathe between the works. In a tender and gentle affirmation Adrian Hall’s Dans les champs de l’observation le hazard
ne favorise que les esprits prepares: Louis Pasteur – Lectures, Lilles 1854.
For the unprepared spirit however, there was much meaning in a documented
moment that recalled another intimate encounter and documentations with the
person and work of Joseph Beuys.
LS: The work of Barbara Halnan is always
meticulously made and imparts ideas of underlying systems, measure and clarity.
From chaos into order, she ‘ferreted’ to find and use MDF offcuts, the final
presentation on the wall an exercise in avoiding right-angles and parallel
lines with a result that is, conversely, regular and concise.
ER: Ambrose Reisch’s
small black sculpture sits a little mysteriously on a plinth. Called Toast it is a found toaster holding not
bread but two small identical books. The work is painted almost entirely black.
LS: As black as burnt toast, Louise Morgan’s
adjacent works Impact
carry the marks of rain and serve as pictorial lace as well as a record of the
effect of heavy summer storms on sheets of handmade paper.
LS: This last week it was Nicole Ellis’ work KIT that most eloquently encapsulated
the exhibition as a movable feast, a portable grab bag of adaptive and
adaptable art. Ellis uses recycled textiles, suggesting continuum, pace and
renewal. Its position, hung from a beam, suggests it is temporary. As the
FERRET exhibition continues its progressive dance, the works, as installations,
inhabitations and occupations of the varied spaces of Articulate Project space
blur and merge into each other, hauntings from the past, influencing and
predicting the future. Artists and art come and go, resting and conversing a
while in the space before packing it all up and moving on.
[i] Esther Anatolitis, #artsagenda, Media
Release, 5 February 2018, NAVA website, https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2018/media-release-artsagenda/
