Along with re-branding itself this year with a crest Platform has included a garden and a video cabinet. It is remarkable to have a garden underground in a subway but it is surviving. The video cabinet is right at the back of the subway beyond the stairs to Degraves Street.
Sample, Ilia Rosli, ‘I Have a Circular Driveway’ is a video with installation; the installation matching the colors on the video to fill the cabinet. It looks good and the only fault that I could find with it was the dense content of the video itself, the longer you look at it the less coherent it appears.
Vitrine, Katy Bowman, ‘Mending’ is an installation window display about healing full safety pins and red, white and manila colors. The installation refers to the practice of artists as shamanic healers, ecstatically manipulating images, trying to mend the body (or the world) by recreating it. Bowman uses nostalgic images from old first aid books to sugar coat her medicine.
Majorca, Marita Dyson and Kubota Fumikazu, Macro-Micro, are two large works on paper one by each of the artists but they were so different in style that they appear completely separate.
Platform, Catherine Sewell, ‘The Playground Project’, is a scatter-style installation made up readymade elements. Sewell’s cabinets play back, play with, play off, play down, play up and play around using sports equipment, toys, playing cards, clothes, wigs and artificial turf. It looks like a lot of fun. This kind of art appears to require no talent but is well organized and considered, making this very contemporary style of exhibition accessible to the general public who view Platform.
This exhibition is timely because Kevin Rudd’s mantra “working families” stands in contrast to Catherine Sewell’s exhibition on the diversity of play. Trades Hall and the Union movement divide work and play equally, 8 hours of each; but Rudd has forgotten about play because it is not economically important. Artists (and other people) are not so clear about the distinction between work and play.
Black Mark 