Sculpture survey has fun with art - Robert Nelson
NEWS & REVIEWS – VISUAL ART REVIEW
- The Age newspaper, Melbourne — Wednesday 18 January 2006
Metro Section, page 18
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THE inspiration behind Phil Price's beautiful sculpture, Ratytus, is a New Zealand bird that doesn't fly. The explanation is useful as you gaze up into the element of birds, where the artist has hoisted a twisted plane that spins on one axis and revolves gracefully on another. The work hovers in hypnotic rhythms on the point of flight, but remains grounded. It bears a coincidental resemblance to modern windmills. These controversial objects somehow match the fate of flightless birds: they belong to the air, but are unable to take off.
Price's sculpture turns in similar circles: with its rigorous engineering it engages the air and addresses the landscape, powerful and ominous at the same time.
There are several engaging and beautiful works in this year's survey. The outstanding ones juggle at least one image in a fine relationship with the materials.
David Howell's HQ is a witty and handsome replica of a Holden of the 1970s. The full-scale car is rendered in concrete, which has all the inertia that the car would have difficulty overcoming. The grey cult-object is in its own tomb, the end of the road for the manufacturer, the driver and fond admirers.
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Jessie Cacchillo and Craig Waddell
Ab-stractor 2005
Donna Marcus
The twelve apostles 2005
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Jarrad Kennedy pays similar homage to a popular image in his Court, which is a paradoxical title for a giant inverted milk crate. The extruded plastic construction has been interpreted in wood, so that it resembles a kind of pergola or walk-in timber gazebo. Once inside, the architecture loses all sense of a crate, as a robust domesticity displaces any frisson of illegality of stolen commercial property.
Donna Marcus also takes a popular image, aluminium vessels, and synthesises it in The Twelve Apostles. The 12 majestic columns refer to the now-depleted geological towers on the western coast of Victoria. The humble and perhaps discarded objects assume a totemic presence, with scores of horizontal accents, as of the tradition of monuments or turned timber.
Alexander Seton similarly interprets a popular image in The Beanbag Suite (an Artist's Conceit). On a deck of cement tiles, the sculptor presents a sad group of beanbags, but these are carved in marble. The execution is excellent and the forms are believable - you want to take them inside before they get wrecked by the sun or the next shower. I'm less impressed with the gooey tractor by Jessie Cacchillo and Craig Waddell. Also, the hyphen in the title (Ab-stractor) is in the wrong place. It's an art joke, but the work says nothing urgent about tractors or farming.
The impressive white gun and plotted pathways by Endra Che-Kahn and Marco Mattucci also seem esoteric, given the power of the image of the gun. However, the title, Metamorphosis - and the Path of the Unfolding Diagrammatic Plane, is off-putting.
Roman Liebach's Wharf Spears are the most monumental. They're like awesome pens jammed into a mustard jar. The argument of textures is magnificent and, with their delicate balance, you're drawn between familiarity and dread at the scale.
Philip Cooper's Homo cosmographia is a superbly crafted wooden layered bulb with a kind of metal basket on top. There was no sign saying "Do not touch" so I gave the basket a shove. It rotated perfectly on its axis, poetically spinning the same shape as the bulb in the space above.
Darren Davison's Homespace is a stainless steel shed with a light-lock. You go into the dark and have to let your eyes adjust. The ceiling reveals a pitter-patter of stars, disorientingly reflected in the floor. It's familiar and ethereal at the same time.
Nigel Helyer's Spinner is a beautiful axial conical shape adapted from yacht rigging and abstracted marine vegetation, which is all very appropriate for the site. But the sounds do require a day with wind. Technically, the work is exquisite.
The funniest and cheekiest piece is Marie Sierra's Meme II. A wanton luminous yellow phallic kind of seaweed has applied itself to the joins of the gallery building.
I would like to think that a similar wit possessed Lisa Roet to create her White Ape (the winning entry), which looks like a caricature of John Howard. Political satire would be the only justification for the exorbitant scale of this otherwise minor work, which seems to belong to the tabletop genre of 19th-century animaliers.
Reviewer – Robert Nelson
The McClelland Contemporary Sculpture Survey and Award 2005
McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park
390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin
Until June 25
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