Spielraum is a German word.‘Spiel’ translates as play. But spielraum is a different concept, describing the idea of scope. It suggests that scope and its adjacent concepts of latitude, freedom and leeway are intrinsically linked to play.
As a set of possibilities spielraum evokes with clarity a state of autonomy. From this point experimentation – with things and ideas – is possible. Spielraum could easily describe the artist’s studio, a space in which the artist engages in making through a process of experimentation with materials and ideas. To it she brings materials and tools: brushes and paper, canvas and clay, board and paints. She contends with their properties; from the porousness of paper to the absorbent surface of bisque fired clay. She works both quickly and slowly, alert to line, gestures and repetitions that develop and emerge from spills and splats like emergent life forms at the junction of the observed world and imagination.
The work requires attention to chance, a willingness to experiment and capitulation with happenstance. It anticipates nothing, other than the movement between action and observation. It’s a practice that takes practice. Maybe this is why it’s serious play. The discipline is the artist’s capacity to return to this space over again and re-engage in it: to step across the threshold of the studio and to encounter the material objects anew, reconfiguring relationships between maturing things and new thoughts.
Theories of play emphasise its role in developing language, social skills and imagination. Imagining anything involves forming a mental picture, one that draws on our memories and ability to form analogies and narratives. It is an action that primarily describes a relationship with our inner life – a psychic space that includes our fantasies and daydreams.
Imaginary fragments are the realm of fantasies and daydreams. They are also the foundation of narrative. We string imaginary fragments together and, over time and with work, these develop into scenes and sequences. Assembled together they constitute the form of a play.
We have arrived at the imaginary theatre. The etymology of theatre is Greek; the term comes from theatron. It means the people in the theatre; a show, a spectacle, a place for viewing. It comes from theasthai: to behold, relating to thea: a view, seeing: a seat in the theatre.
In the theatre the play finds an audience. As such it is the realm of the social, a civic space where play and imagination are transformed into a public proposition. If the analogy carries – and I think it does – to the gallery and the visual arts, what do we behold?
Eleanor Zechhin, Serious Play - scenes for an imagined theatre, POP Gallery, 08 August - September 2021
In what is roughly an annual break from solo exhibitions this month Adelaide-based Hugo Michell Gallery has brought six artists together into a curated exhibition on the theme of domestic architecture. Noel McKenna, Eliza Gosse, Katherine Hattam, Kate Ballis, Elvis Richardson and Paul Davies are based in Sydney and Melbourne; two with strong ties to California. Only one, Elvis Richardson, is represented by the gallery.
Commercial galleries – or commercial contemporary art spaces – as they refer to themselves these days work hard to put a roof over their head and those of their represented artists. In the face of dynamic market conditions and fluctuating consumer confidence they are necessarily inventive; shows like this one are a case in point.
What of it if Going Home would be better titled Going House? Or that in-situ, through no fault of their own the selected works are casualties of obvious curating, look dull and flat?
I’m not here to kvetch. I live in a small regional centre and I’m grateful for news. That includes the opportunity to view new work shown in an environment of affable hospitality.
Aside from Katherine Hattam’s large canvases of vistas that situate the viewer inside looking out, works represented in the assembled paintings and photographs are building facades.
Noel McKenna’s front-on paintings of derelict, down at heel and time worn Queenslanders, including that childhood home of former Prime Minister Paul Keating, convey a sense a striking even, uncanny familiarity through a command of the vernacular. A curled cat on a brick fence is the sole sign of life.
Eliza Gosse’s slick paintings of mid century modern facades offer a reassuring blankness in which the building itself is tamed through a narrow tonal expression into a fetishistic interplay of surfaces and materials. The addition of a rear or side view of vintage and older model cars in each painting lends them a truly formulaic quality as though modelled on the instructions issued by a realtor.
Paul Davies is represented by a single canvas of an imposing two story mid century house framed by towering trees and their reflection in the swimming pool. The intricate paint surface is built up in icy pastels by the use of a stencil. Stately, imposing and isolated it celebrates hyper masculinity by utilising techniques – a colour palette, the decorative – historically associated with the ‘feminine’.
Kate Ballis, tucked away in a side gallery, has photographed the buildings around Palm Springs, California using infrared technology that renders the images in strong Barbie hues. The most directly commercial in appeal Ballis’ photographs of bessa brick walls, butterfly roof lines and hotel signage are eerily still, as though documenting a post human world. Death Valley, California, a mere 500 km away, recorded the highest temperatures on Earth last week.
Elvis Richardson’s powder coated candy pink gate is the one sculptural object in the exhibition. Its decorative curls and the word OCCUPATION and flags inscribed with the word settlement is both deliberately cute and cutting. Gates are a blunt marker of land boundaries. Fixating on the domestic scale, Richardson’s piece alludes, with a surprising degree of force, to historical processes of Aboriginal land dispossession.
The task for commercial galleries – presenting works for sale – can be at odds with what constitutes an interesting exhibition. Hanging same with same offers a clear directive to collectors but not necessarily to viewers looking for a thoughtful, engaging show.
In Katherine Hattam’s four paintings figure and ground appears collapsed – or expanded, if you like – into a psychological space where objects such as a phone, laptop, glasses and book titles are anchored by a window frame. The vistas hold a range of pictorial possibilities: language, native flora and fauna, water views that examine the contours of interiority. Hattam’s paintings offer a conception of home and place that acknowledges the life and forces of an ecosystem. It was a welcome, markedly different, perspective.
Hugo Michell Gallery , Adelaide, 24 June—24 July 2021, Published 29 June 2021, The Review Board
It’s only now with artists beginning to display work made during 2020 that we are beginning to gain an insight into the impact of the pandemic and the accompanying economic uncertainty, threat to personal safety, and restriction of movement has wrought on individuals.
For Brendan Huntley, a mid-career artist and musician of renown, it meant changing gears. In a practical sense, it affected the way that he worked; lockdowns necessitated consolidating two studio spaces – one for painting, the other for ceramics some distance away – to home base, an adjustment that has brought two parallel practices into closer proximity.
Huntley’s work has always drawn in found materials from his domestic and immediate environment and folded disparate influences into his work in a tactile and casual way. The ceramic sculptural objects that he’s made in the past from heads, to large vessel-like forms, possess an appealing talismanic charm and animistic vitality, summoning through their sheer object-ness the elemental forces of the cosmos and the spectre of ritual without being either pious or freakishly intense.
Huntley continues this approach in his current exhibition, Without Within. It presents thirty-six works on paper and accompanying ceramic sculptures, this time of moths. The insect is not only a symbol of transformation but a creature that undertakes its metamorphoses reconstituting itself inside a cocoon. This makes it a primo metaphor for 2020.
I was jazzed by the sight of the oil pastels, mounted in a 12 x 3 grid extending along the gallery wall. They are cheery, smeary, and energetic ‘portraits’ combining across the series both the repetition of the symmetry of the moth’s form: wings, abdomen, and antennae, while allowing for variation in expression that incorporates male and female biological markers, fannies and ripped six-packs, along with some funny little faces. Each one reiterates the face with the feature of an eye on each wing and a simple line for a smile. Messing up the plain and unapologetic directness is some complex and colourful patterning.
Between the works covering the walls and ceramic moths dotted on an arc of plinths, the gallery pulsates with waves, zig-zags, polka dots, straight lines, diamonds, and squares. While the patterning style recalls the textile loom construction, Huntley’s hand is loose injecting a sure, notational style. In the works on paper, he achieves sketchy, frenetic blocking of colour. The ceramic moths’ layer glaze patterning with the surface printing and the application of shapes and rolled clay.
Artists speak of influences, but viewers register associations. Freewheeling, wide-ranging my mind flitted between modernism’s fascination with Oceanic art (and particularly Picasso and Brancusi), and the disarming naivete of Mirka Mora’s paintings, to the mania of Mike Brown’s collages. Writers have noted the unstable relationship with the concept of the future in the work of contemporary artists. Faced with an uncertain present moment Huntley has fashioned a collection of works that assert themselves with an emphatic, positive conviction like a mantra, or refrain. If there is any ‘tell’ of the wigginess of 2020, it seems to me to reside in this closed feedback loop.
Each sculpture bears the artist’s initials prominently, some incorporate an imprint of Huntley’s name, along with the month and year of creation. Sitting between record-keeping and swagger this detail makes a bold claim much like the tags of graffiti artists in civic spaces. It says I’m here. Pay attention. I’m in the process of transforming.
Brendan Huntley ‘Without Within’, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 7 April—15 May 2021, Published 08 May 2021
