The three exhibitions on offer have the effect of deconstructing and destabilising assumed paradigms. Penny Siopis achieves through the juxtaposition of painting and sculpture; Jody Brand through her subversive photographs, and Mitchell Gilbert Messina accomplishes this through reflecting on the overproduction of internet video.
Siopis’s familiar glue and ink style present to the eye a flowering cascade of pinks, purples, reds, greens and yellow. Yet this abstract sense of formlessness struggle to become a figure or face that emerge from the flowering forms. This tension between the “real” and the abstract is further articulated in her odd juxtaposition of sculptures (often stuck directly on the canvas surface).
These figures and busts and merely a rock crystal or semi-precious stone create a tension for the very reality of the painting is questioned. This is so as one is somehow disallowed from simple reverie in colour and form, and instead these sculptures, culled from the Western artistic tradition, implicate the painting objects as bearers of a truth other than their aesthetic beauty.
For now, they are unrealities, mere stuff that is poured (consider her video and stills in this light), running beyond the canvas format (she often includes the running and spilling that would occur outside of the canvas frame) and these sensual delights are mere imaginings. There is a third dimension, inhabited by the sculptural form that is perhaps more real, however contrived it may now seem.
Brand’s photographs are an attempt to reclaim a sense of pride in the “othered”, and she does this by creating images that defer the onlookers’ gaze. Instead, her “subjects” appear to claim their own space and at the same time a harmony with the natural surroundings. In effect, this inverts the classical norm and certain conventions, and testifies to an inclusiveness of voices.
The usual binary of pretty versus ugly is subverted without dissolving into one polarity. In a sense, that tension remains and in that struggle the images transcend simply, rigid definitions. This malleability then implies that the body and mind are two sides of the same coin. Brand’s figures might be contentious, but they go beyond the conventional art historical narrative which would pander, in the main, to an elitist male audience. This New Classicism thus promises the embrace of new narratives, whatever one’s assumed ideological agenda.
Messina’s video piece also deconstructs assumed hierarchies. It questions the idea of a well-crafted video work by paying tribute to the YouTube autoplay feature. The story is fragmented and haphazard, reflecting on the fact that perhaps one’s attention span is limited further through constant streaming, short clips and a break in any one narrative (which is not necessarily negative).
One gets the sense that it’s a video comparable to an architect who lets all the various scaffoldings and features of the building be exposed. One gains a second-order reflective view of contemporary culture, wherein information is ubiquitous and accessible, but no order or coherence results. In fact, the great expanse of possibility renders a potential ordering system difficult to discern.
Taken as a totality, the three solo shows invite the viewer to relinquish the belief that one can think oneself out of a spider’s net. Instead, one hears the “other” as an echo of one’s own scream into the abyss. This is the quintessence of deconstruction - the destabilising of boundaries and intrinsic hierarchies. Yet this is an already old hat and there may be a shift beyond this wherein “anything goes” and a modernist utopia might exist side by side.
In that respect, the exhibition points beyond its particular aesthetic to a plateau of meaning wherein, in Siopis’s words, “physical objects fall in and out of the painted world. Some press their faces against the painted surface, touching their own reflection. What forces pull here, push there? The republic is a particular public in a world of flux”.
In a world of flux, one must still ask what it is that changes, that is, there must be some constant which is to be in flux in the first place.