The first thing I must say is, and I think you’ll all agree, how much Bronwyn [Lace] and Anthea [Moys] should be commended and congratulated for this exhibition. Their use of scale, space and fantasy all add a bit to an uncanny experience of ourselves inside these walls.
There’s kind of a playful, and charged, disorder to this space, to our roles in this space; to the world we co-create with the artists, within this space.
When I first came into the gallery I felt like I was entering Brazil - and I’m speaking not of the South American country, but rather, the Terry Gilliam film.
Admittedly, recent experiences of Home Affairs bureaucracy helped add to my imagination in this vein, but the leftovers of literal plastic surgery gone awry, of surveillance and the voyeur, of false safety as order and order as chaos, are all here, adding dimensions to dementia, just as it begins to set in.
As we sip on our misspelled champagne and experience the cacophony that IS misspelled pandemonium, I feel like I might just wake up from someone else’s nightmare, only to find myself still dreaming without sleeping, or worse, sleeping without dreaming.
I feel like laughing, but it’s not because something is humorous.
There’s no specific point of reference for any of these works, but many points at which we might find a referent story. Both artists begin with core and concrete situations that provoke and entice - whether they be political, personal, emotional - then twist and turn through aesthetics and materiality, until they reach something that feels, juuuuuust…. wrong.
It’s fantasy, without being fantastic. I’m completely grounded in my body, utterly aware of my physicality, or my normality, despite the quirky, awkwardness around and inside of me.
I feel small, and I feel scared.
I told Anthea and Bronwyn that the more time I spent here, the more I felt like tearing down their installations, ripping apart the seams that seem all too familiar to my dreams, but completely out of place and, actually, aggressive when I’m embedded within them, as flesh.
With Anthea’s work, there’s an undercurrent of sin, of potentiality, of flight. As I negotiate through her ocean of displacement, I can feel myself, literally, twitching.
At first, it feels surreal
please won’t you pump some air your ear?
Listen to me bathe in a shack?
Join me for tea in a rubbish rose garden?
But just as quickly, we’re confronted with an escape route - Mary Poppins meets Magritte, and all we need is our umbrellas.
It’s impulsive. It’s playful. It’s manic. It’s ambiguous. It’s a gesture, and many gestures all at once.
Can you hear it?
It’s much bigger than we are.
Bronwyn, on the other hand, asks us to explore our fears of safety, and the paradoxical comfort we find in our fears.
For lack of a better term, once we “step inside,” we find tedious, arduous, painstaking tasks, committed to order the unfathomable, toooo - not, deconstruct, or unpack, or even edit->undo - but, unWIND, the ordered.
It’s like that Weezer song…. (forgive me, but I feel as if Weezer lyrics should be heard more often at art openings)
If you want to destroy my sweater, Hold this thread as I walk away…
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
Lying on the floor,
I’ve come undone.
Quite literally, we can look through Bronwyn’s process, from largest to smallest, as she unWinds, and comes undone.
Both on meta and micro levels, we’re confronted with fragility, accountability, and sometimes our own stupidity.
“the article” acts as:
. a definitive predecessor to any object or noun
. a journalistic review
. or something with which we make origami.
It’s formed, deformed, reformed.
It’s the object as story, as aesthetic, as beauty, as enjoyment.
Thank you, Bronwyn and Anthea, for asking me, unexactly, what I may or may not know.
