Genuinely gorgeous work
MY NAME Cici Xiyue Zhang Good Grief Studios Argyle St, Hobart Open Thursday and Sunday noon-4pm Price range: $100-$6800
My Name is a complex, moody, ephemeral show that features differing modes of expression and experiment. There are striking loose pastel paintings that have an oozing, floating aquatic quality that literally spills out of the frame.
Many of these works have delicate, freefloating extensions that ooze, with a subtle, playful unruliness, well out of the works: frames and edges mean little. There’s a strong sense that many of these images are derived from the random worlds we find at the edge of consciousness, and the way the works break free seems to enhance that. It’s genuinely gorgeous work that is richly sensual and playful.
These works would have made a captivating show all on their own, but there’s a lot more here that fleshes the show right out. There’s a series of much more fragmentary, contained works all titled “My Diary”.
It’s not quite stated if there was an actual diary that Cici Xiyue Zhang has plundered these works from, but they’re different to the rich compositions they accompany: they are small, thoughtful, delicate fragments that have the slightly unconscious quality we might find in a doodle but with much more commitment. These diary images are fully realised in their execution and feel very complete. This selection speaks to how the artist works – it feels as if there’s a constant stream of productivity emerging from the artist’s consciousness in a somewhat raw state – nothing is overworked but there’s so much flowing out on to the page.
Accompanying all the painted, drawn and sculpted works is the arguable centrepiece of the whole show – an absolutely stunning and engrossing animation. Composed entirely of drawings by the artist, there’s a strange story that unspools with a real sense of magic realism on to the screen. You can see the impressions of felt pens and the edges of cut-out forms, but it works incredibly well and is fully realised. We see sinewy figures toiling, finding babies growing in the soil and experiencing loss and going on journeys, meeting with giants and experiencing upheaval and change. It’s hard to really describe what’s going on, but this is the success of the short film – it establishes its own logic and the narrative is constructed out of that.
What Xiyue Zhang has done so well with this show is welcome us into a complex inner world of dreams and ideas. Much of the work is about the sheer rush of creative expression, but there’s also a commitment to exploring the possibilities of form and investigating where physical imagery emerges from the inner sphere of the idea. The work is incredibly fresh and expressive, tinged with eroticism and a sense of joy, alongside an intense commitment to experimentation.
Get to this show for the amazing animated work, but stay to take in the exuberant joy in making art that tinges everything here.
A FEATHERED ALPHABET Dawn Oakford and Craig Williams Cuckoo etc
Mary St, Cygnet
Until November
Price range: $140-$1000
The recently opened Cuckoo store located on Mary St in Cygnet is a new development in the ongoing story of Cuckoo, which began its life as a quarterly artisan market based at Shambles brewery in Hobart. Now Cuckoo has become ‘Cuckoo etc’ as well, and has a more regular physical location, right on Mary St. As well as a broad showcase of artisanal wares and craft objects, there are now regular exhibitions scheduled, making Cuckoo etc a good spot to find some new work from Tasmanian artists.
November will see Cuckoo etc present A Feathered Alphabet, a show which celebrates Australian bird life. This show features elegant ceramics by Dawn Oakford, who uses a slip casting method to create her works. While Craig Williams is a painter with impressive, near-scientific skill who produces stunning renderings on carefully found archival paper he has sourced himself, from old books and rescued maps. Williams’ works are striking and clever, and provide a realistic balance to the more stylised works of Oakford. Both artists have produced a literal alphabet of birds for this show, so there’s a lot to take in. A Feathered Alphabet manages to be beautiful, and has a timely undercurrent of noting birds that are endangered.