illusion/illusion
- 11 July - 19 September 2010
- The Elisabeth Murdoch Gallery
illusion/illusion is a group exhibition developed around the theme of visual perception and deception. Through the work of four young contemporary artists, Briele Hansen, Justine Khamara, Dorota Mytych and Kit Webster, the exhibition exploits a full range of multi-media disciplines, ranging from photography and drawing, to video display systems and digital video projections. The exhibition explores contemporary themes ranging from social commentary to the enjoyment of pure abstraction.
Briele Hansen uses video projections to create a series of installations in which the illusion is hypnotically real such as the effect of water drip patterns ripping across the surface of a bath and an installation of writhing figures under bed sheets on a mattress. In her multiple video display work she investigates the subtle light changes of bush that gradually morph and reverse from two dimensional to three dimensional readings of the forest of gumtrees.
Dorota Mytych creates drawings composed of minute tea leaves which through video time-lapse sequences slowly form and suddenly disintegrate as if blown by the wind. Solitary figures gradually merge into faces and disappear; portraits slowly morph into firing squads, all part of a series of poignant monochromatic images that evoke powerful social messages. When her set of apparent traditional charcoal portrait and landscapes drawings are examined closely, it becomes evident that the dark tonal areas composed of minutely drawn figures, are amassed in an open field to form the various graphic details.
Justine Khamara uses multiple photographic portraits which she then collages together over a spherical shape into one larger single face, or through computer printing morphs images of herself and her brother onto the laser-cut contoured ridges of various dome-like forms.
Of the four, Kit Webster is the only artist who works with entirely within abstraction. In his video environment he projects syncopated patterns of coloured lines and shapes which form and dissolve over geometric forms, at times reinforcing the three dimensionality of the objects before running counter to the geometry and destroying our spatial readings. His video projection installation is an intricately composed synesthetic environment which plays with the coupling of light, sound and space.
As if emulating a scientific method as a way of investigating our perception of the materiality of the world, from basic units such as atomic particles to observable structures, the illusion/illusion artists use micro details or fractals that built to patterns, which viewed on a macro level form and build images and installations. A significant quantum in the panoply of ideas in illusion/illusion is the manipulation of the cross-over, the boundary between the simultaneous coexistence of different levels of perception as the key to their illusions.
