Artworks can be tantalising
ARTWORKS can be tantalising objects.
They are the visual expressions of ideas, imagery, thoughts, and feelings.
They offer introductions to different techniques and diverse materials often through surface manipulation.
This may be by the actual physical and tactile texture of the materials used such as layered thread or the sheen of silk.
It may be texture created with the application of paint to give an illusory effect of matter.
Two regional exhibitions offer much to explore from concepts translated through surface to their resolution in shape and form.
The Rosalie Gallery in Goombungee is presenting the exhibition Points of Convergence, featuring paintings by Victoria Cattoni and sculptures by Wendy Howard.
The works, despite their physical differences, seem to hold a mirror to each other.
Colours, planar surfaces, and textures become points of convergence.
Howard’s geometrical shapes of silk stretched over cardboard armatures have a restrained elegance.
Subtle pastels are punctuated by vibrant blue, rich burgundy, and a celebratory splash of chartreuse.
The sculptures are set atop tall plinths that obscure sightlines to the paintings, yet the fractured glimpses set up an oblique dialogue with the colour highlights and the sense of flux captured on the surfaces of Cattoni’s works.
Each painting is an interpretation of the “colour of matter”.
Mass and volume occupy space as various forms of matter that seem to transition from the solid to vaporous fields of energy.
Cattoni’s slight and insubstantial surfaces float and hover.
There is a sense of movement where shapes seem to merge, blend, separate, and reform.
In spite of the rather studied exhibition design, the works sit well in this gallery space of artificial and natural light which enhance the effect of shifting colours.
The Crows Nest Gallery is hosting “…eat a lot of peaches,” the enigmatically titled exhibition by Karee S Dahl.
The body of work occupies a liminal space between drawing, painting, and sculpture to become a fibre-based installation.
Dahl has used polyester thread to draw her imagery.
The thread is unravelled from a spool to create layers and pools of colour that are shaped into still life portraits of household vessels of familiarity and comfort like the homeliness associated with the work of Giorgio Morandi.
The painterly shading and shadows are subtle definitions of form created by discreet changes in the colours of the thread.
The exhibition also includes a series of kangaroo studies again “painted” with thread.
These allude to a childhood memory of native fauna visiting the backyard.
There is a refreshing honesty in the works by Dahl, endorsed by a quote from the South African artist, William Kentridge who suggests that artmaking is an interaction with uncertainty, ambiguity, and the familiar.
Kentridge also said that art must defend the uncertain, and Dahl has done this with confidence.