Pleasures and Terrors – The City

‘Pleasures and Terrors - The City’ explores the physical and emotional sense of a city, delving into what constitutes a geographical and cultural space. It not only refers to Melbourne, and other physical cities, but also the internal nostalgic city held in memory from past travel or literary interpretation. The exhibition presents the work of five artists, Pip Edwards, Natasha Frisch, Geneine Honey, Paul White and Kit Wise, whose work explores this very notion, by tapping into the underbelly of city life. Works investigate issues such as dislocating intimate city surroundings, the living history of buildings within a city environment, existing in a consumer society, contemporary identity and navigation of new terrains.
Paul White’s installation L.A.ndscape utilises his interest in sewn works which were developed whilst spending time in Los Angeles undertaking an MFA at California Institute of the Arts. For White the use of fabric and sewing reflects and ‘attempts to strip back [his] practice.’1 The use of felt and fabric becomes universal to his art as it stands for blankness and affordability. L.A.ndscape explores weakness, unease and identity in Los Angeles. The cityscape reflects the cyclic nature of such a city; constantly evolving and recycling, obsessed with the material, the gun and the fear. White comments, ‘evidence of reinvention/reuse, decay (& survival) reveals the possibility of obsolescence, loss and nostalgia for the past, whilst also celebrating the future and possibility’2.
Issues of living in a consumer society and memory have featured in the past work of Geneine Honey. Her work Untitled in ‘Pleasures and Terrors – The City’ continues these themes, and also brings forth notions of location and the recurring nature of life. Honey’s graphite and watercolour on paper features repetition as a means of conveying memory and nostalgia associated with the surroundings. Flinders Street station is used to bring forth immediacy and intimacy of the work and artist.
A rainbow of tiny and colourful dots work together to form a cohesive and co-dependant mass. Pip Edwards explains it as ‘a dreamscape merged with hidden layers of personal intimacy’3. View a city from afar and let its blurred lights and rooftops tell you a single story, but cut through this accumulative facade, slide in through an open window and let a room reveal its big stories – just one little dot. So many little dots, meticulously mapped and coloured, always dreaming in dots becomes a mechanical, repetitious production of ‘rhythm, a continuous flow which feels safe and comforting’4. Edwards builds layers to protect and hide personal intimacies but when presented as a whole, they become one giant map of dreams and memories.
KTM SEA MOW RUH projects an image of the city with dual sensitivity to the local and the tourist. Kit Wise comments, ‘the cityscapes are an attempt to document the experience of the familiar and the exotic being thrown together in the crude cocktail of jetlag’5. The whiteness of the light creates a sense of clarity that is contradicted by the confusion of the negative image it projects. The image itself, only a projection, a reflection of a time and place, captured. Wise’s cities are the details that lie in the negative space. The photograph, as a whole image is the familiar to the resident and the negative, the flipside of the same image, the impression of an outsider.
Natasha Frisch’s paper sculpture It was never meant to be this way investigates the ephemeral nature of the urban landscape. The city is the slave to time and a changing society, the building is altered on a whim, on the shifting need of the resident. The intent of design is forgotten as new demands of a space are executed. Her work, delicate tracing paper poles arranged to mimic the bars of the gallery window, imply a greater effort in design and application than those that cling to the buildings exterior. The paper bars draw attention to the interior, to the view of the landscape from the inside now carved through metal bars. The paper bars are temporary but have permanently transformed the view from the window.

Nicole Muir and Olivia Poloni

Footnotes
1 Paul White , Artist Statement from Drawings, Room 35 at Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney (Nov 2004)
2 Ibid.
3 Pip Edwards, Artist Statement (Berlin, 2006)
4 Ibid.
5 Kit White, Artist Statement from New Work, Criterion Gallery (Hobart, 2005)