Rhythm and Pulse

Why hello there! This is Kent - gallery director - and occasional writer and reviewer in other contexts. I've put together a curated show this month at Stockroom and because I love to talk about good art I thought I'd jump into the blogosphere and let you know about this particular show.

 Liang Luscombe, After Proun Room I

It's called 'Rhythm and Pulse' and features Bryan Spier, Rhett D'Costa, Renee Cosgrave, Troy Christmass and Liang Luscombe - artists that work with abstraction and run the gamut from the internationally collected to young rising stars. The show is on in the Project Space which is a gallery that we like to use for exhibitions that test out new ideas, bring together artists new to showing with us, or for more program oriented events. The title of the show is a reflection of the artworks – repetitive, fractured, patterned and component forms. This sort of accumulated segmentation of colour and shape felt, to me, very much like an oscillating rhythm, not unlike musical notation or the wavelength pulses of a heartbeat. Hence the title.

Here's a little video I made, to give you a feel for the show:

Rhythm and Pulse

One of the joys of curating individual artists together as a group is the unexpected relationships that occur between the artworks. It’s almost like a group of characters set free in a space to make friends, form alliances and share their experiences. The character traits of each work begin to highlight the similarities and differences with their neighbours, drawing out new meaning and new possibilities.

Troy Christmass, Monotony (sold)

An aspect of interest for me in this show was the relationship between 2D and 3D image making. It was important for me to have a sculptural work in the show, so Liang's, and particularly Troy’s artwork are great inclusions. By having Troy's large piece in the space it has amplified the sculptural qualities of all the other works it sits with. Liang’s almost architectural shapes become even more heightened, the materiality and substance of her sculpture even more apparent. The offcut supports for Bryan’s wonderfully flat paintings seem more hefty, more solid even. The delicate and fluttering threads of Rhett’s drawing somehow drift further from the wall and make more obvious the process of moving his hand back and forth, piercing through the paper. Even Renee’s flat triangles on plywood – the found panels now somehow more a part of the full artwork and not just a support for the paint.

There’s many more examples of this sort of effect of connections - this is just one used as an example. Underlying the whole show though, I think, is a performative element to all of the works. The nature of the artworks reveal a subtle but powerful trace of the artist’s persistence, of their compulsive drive to make. Their repetitive nature is the major contributor to this feeling. There’s a palpable sense that each artist has devoted their time, their energy to the task of doing. And doing over and over and over again. All visible for us to see as an archive of their motion, movement and consideration.

The show is on until May 6, and I really hope you get a chance to come along and check it out. You can even acquire a piece for yourself - it's beautiful work and all the artists are worth the support. You'll be seeing a lot more of all them around the galleries and across the country over the next couple of years.