Homage and Histories
For the past century abstraction in art has been the agency for thinking about sound and audio constructions situated in relationship to moving images. The artist's task is to assemble parts that come to represent the whole. This concern with arrangement and juxtaposition is set-up as a counterpoint to metaphor. Most of the past century was spent inventing strategies to deal with this new surgical visual language. These linguistically brutal acts were more about being able to repeat vision than it was about seeing an instance in its originality. For it is film that has the remarkable ability to be organised to move in multiple directions conveying novelistic types of folded visual terrains.
Film is constructed as multiple cells that can represent a reality by partially repeating themselves. Images in films can rapidly change position like a group of notes do in a sequence of music or change in radical physical movement. Film's volatility can drastically change our consciousness. Film propels the viewer through space and time. It displaces our anticipation for complete memory. Sound too can challenge the idea of linear memory. Using a device as simple and intangible as a radio we embark on new and abstract journeys that will allow the transmission of mnemonic details to cross frontiers bypassing the need for the littoral translation.
Radio and film are forms of collage being made up of fractured parts. Their parts may begin as a regional folkloric or they may transcribe an urban environment. Editing processes partly represent authorship in these new medias. At every turn sound and film are coded by an authority marked in editing (or framing) processes. Film and sound juxtapose various layers of simultaneous thought as montage. This part of processing is what makes this an art of renewal.
By absorbing ideas from urban societies in the modern world the artist builds constructive forms from information refined and filtered through the patterns, processes and procedures of their studio practice. In weaving their multiple visions we can read these artists' meticulously crafted works as serious forms of visual play. The cut mark is the edit of collage and it's projection onto screen guides the work into a schema of blocks set against each other as a sort of concrete language transforming the plastic elements into a combination called spatial syntax.
Both artists relate enthusiastically to the history of modern European painting and sculpture. To some extent their art is pedagogical. To avoid didactic and overly academic strategies these artists set up improvised courses of action that draw the body around the materials and surfaces relationally. They equally control the baroque tableaux to allow a sublime immersion in the painting or the form itself. In their separate ways both artists have referred to the design of the tissue of their canvas as a type of screen. Crawford refers to the social organisation of space in terms determined by economic necessity. He cites the Great Depression when domestic space was at times arranged like a theatre-set in which one's living zone was internally segmented by improvised screens, to allow for privacy. Eastaway refers to her laminated canvases as recycled areas where the 'light' is suspended or projected. The border is a conscious zone that cuts between the fields-of-form and the exhibition spaces they occupy.
In these paintings we see colour and non-colour massaged and scraped, brushed and soaked, cut out and drawn into the very tissue of the membrane itself. The arrangement of collaged construction and 'screened' (scrim) painting rapidly builds into an unusual dimensionality (planarity) that is evident in this installation itself. One of the surprises of both these artist's works to me is how an Arte Povera approach translates as an ecology of art, the re-crafting of found materials. In many ways the patina that is evident in the various surfaces and materials is in part a critical process of salvage and renewal being determined by its re-transmission.
A simile is more than just the matter of, 'the thing-is-like' in an artistic atmosphere. This artistic partnership is a co-operative homage that compliments each other. For artists to formally link-up as intellectual and artistic equals is fairly rare today. The sympathetic arrangement of friendship outside the private space of the studio or teaching engagements into this public exhibition is what I want to call a correspondence of kindness . For to do so convincingly by speaking in a shared artistic dialect acquires a unique place in the history of Australian art.
Ruark Lewis |
