Epidemic

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Craft ACT Gallery One and Two: 13 August - 25 August 2009

Outbreak of talent on show

by Zsuzsi Soboslay
The Canberra Times - Times 2 21 August 2009, page 8

Epidemic is less a result of bacterial spillage than of deeply-worked, well-individuated responses to what it means to make art as a young practitioner.

Described as a "breaking out" of young artists into the public milieu, it's a more apt analogy to call it a harvest, selected by staff at Craft ACT, of the best recent graduates from the University of Canberra, Australian National University School of Art and Canberra Institute of Technology.

Dan Edwards focuses on the "typical trademark of the 1970s craftsman, the beard and hand-knitted jumper", with a row of jumper-scarves as distinctive as woolen clan kilts. Their lengths of interlocked hexagonal shapes wear like an irreverent scapula - an elegant cellular geometry and gauchely coloured materials pleasantly working against each other. His wall-mounted felting, The woolen aesthetic, is like a De Kooning splash across plain plywood canvas. Dynamic and playfully assertive, it is a wry comment on the values placed on painting versus craft.

Ply is the feature of Ben Hubbard's Animal imagination clothes rack, a wacky, ingenious flat board with stencil cutouts of animal shapes on which to hang clothes. His elephant benches are like dynamic Ikea stools but funnier, with a quaint feeling of comedown for the noble elephant.

Renee Osterloh exhibits a modular chair in its white-painted prototype of bluefoam and fiberglass. Plastic multiples are being produced. The chair, somewhat like a Barbara Hepworth, sits clean, clear and curved in the gallery space. It's remarkably comfortable. In 2008, Osterloh won the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (ACT branch) prize.

Eden Waugh looks at how we sit in ourselves. His 10 paintings depict human vulnerability: saints and sick people, whores and cripples, the quick and the dead. The figure in the coffin of The Funeral is painted in a glassy fashion, almost as if a mirror of his former life. In Contemplation, a smoking man sees his double in the wallpaper. Waugh's paintings reflect an ambiguity to do with self and selves and experience playing either side of the skin. Homage to Bonnard, whilst respectful of Bonnard's little dog, is also a twist on the presumptions Bonnard makes of our complicity in viewing the "subject" of his vision. Here the subject, with twisted mouth and askance look, wonders how it found its way into the painting.

The risk Jacob Potter takes is of a different order, playing brash colours and textures against each other. Potter creates a unique sense of form and space by virtue of this friction. His Untitled 3 is brisk with its scraped-back technique. 1 and 2 explore rougher textures against flattened terrains.

Robert Blackwell's elegant, laser cut, wall-mounted Climb provides a trompe-d'oeil to the dynamics of the room. This piece would work in all kinds of architectural situations, confounding our sense of special direction.

In Deborah Fiori's Crucible showcase, Lost You, her subject is looking for definition. Combining the sheen of silver with the translucency of soap in her intimate jewellery pieces, Fiori hovers three birds over a pile of shadowy people (Comfort and Pain) or a fragile wreath just holds a flight of leaves against a wind. They are delicate memories of something once held, now lost.