Resurface

The Nicholas Building shows evidence of its age and of its occupants’ use since its construction in the mid twenties. Makeshift holes are drilled through the levels to accommodate changing electrical and communications systems; tiles bulge from the wall as though the humid building has slumped comfortably into its place on Swanston Street; the marble stairs are worn in the middle, closer to the hand-rail; the period bathroom fittings remain, as the dated elevator system becomes a reason in itself to visit the building; quirky, insightful, drunken inscriptions on walls are respectfully left to stay… Remnants of occupation and various stylistic, structural and functional renovations today form a nostalgic palimpsest that is accountable for the Nicholas Building’s undeniable charm.
As the overlapping layers of the Nicolas Building’s history are revealed and hidden through time, the works in the two-person exhibition, resurface, recede and protrude from the gallery space. At certain angles they are unseen, and at others, become an almost cancerous invasion on the space. Beth Arnold’s plaster piece Untitled departs from one small aspect the building’s current state - its warped tiled walls, while Sary Zananiri’s glass piece is derived from the chaotic network of pipes that visibly extend from floor to floor.

While these pieces are whimsical exaggerations of these features, they respond to and retain the understated neutral palette of the gallery space and its subtle textures. The smooth waxed plaster tiles of Untitled fuse with the gallery’s plasterboard wall, shifting the space of the gallery and highlighting its compliant nature. The unassuming placement of Sary’s glass pipes makes them seem almost functional… but in a Jeunet-and-Caro kind of way. As these simple forms take on more organic characteristics, their understated origins become uncannily biological… Is there something living, growing underneath the bulge? What fluid is transported through those glass veins?

Symbolically, the house is often aligned with the body. The artists’ treatment of this idea, however, is not merely to examine a conceptual anthropomorphisation of a building. Their examination of the Nicholas Building in relation to its human history proposes that the structural design of buildings has developed in the image of our own bodies, and indeed that architecture could even be seen as an extension of our bodies. The electrical wires that provide light and heat correspond to the arteries that bring vital oxygen to our organs; our neural functions extend through communications networks: telephones and broadband connections; our digestive system begins not at our mouths, but in the plumbing, and ends in the expulsion of waste through the pipes and into the sewers…

Our bodily functions, as well as our emotional, professional, personal desires are projected into the spaces in which we live and work.

As we use our body, we use the building. In the same way that we rejuvenate ourselves, we may renovate a house. And in the same way that we grow old, buildings deteriorate.

The artists approach the building in an almost medical way, replacing missing parts with prosthetic additions, suturing up the damage of time and use, and caring for it in its old age, in its state of decay. But the surgery is cosmetic; it highlights the most beautiful aspects of the Nicholas Building – the human inhabitation that has made the building become human itself. And it is here that we can locate the provenance of this sentimental sense of nostalgia: we imbue the building, Nicholas, with a personality, with a life – one that is at once fragile and sturdy, impressionable and durable, youthful and age-old, beautiful and decrepit.

The fanciful and divine connotations of glass-blowing, the method used to create Sary’s glass piece, is fitting with the life-giving and fantastical undertones of resurface. However, the methodical and accurate processes of casting and moulding used in Untitled points to an interest in the replica, the copy. And, while the artists are interested in the spatial, formal and conceptual details of objects in their context, they are not concerned with making truthful reproductions. What is more important is the way in which relationships between the overlapping and interacting layers of history can be transposed into the imaginary realm, played with, warped and exaggerated. The organic and evolutionary changes that the building has undergone are artificially re-crafted to create obviously man-made forms… but among the other idiosyncratic features of their environment, it seems possible that they could have grown there.

The artistic practices of Sary and Beth come together in the processes of repair and completion; in finding what was lost, in repairing that which was broken, in an inverted hierarchy of forms and objects. Here, in two works they summarise, make beautiful and make sense of the messy, unplanned and haphazard evolution of an entire building.

July 2006
Gabrielle de Vietri

Beth Arnold and Sary Zananiri