On Installation & Grief

Upstairs at the Napier is very quite on a weekday, I didn’t know what was on but I was glad that I paid it a visit. It is an artist run space, just a couple of rooms above the Napier Hotel in Fitzroy. I turned the lights in the gallery on and off myself (it felt interactive and very right for the environment). The white rooms gallery rooms have track lighting on the ceilings but do have some original art nouveau molded tin on the lower walls.

Anne-Marie Kuter has created a fairly standard piece of contemporary art – “Warped Intervention Installation”. A paper mold of a fireplace and ceiling rose, both lit from behind, represent the kind of architectural features that this room would have once had. Why the ceiling was painted green and hung with a multitude of pieces of folded paper was not clear but evocative. Anne-Marie Kuter is on the board of artists who run Upstairs at the Napier.

After this I had no expectations for the next room/gallery so I was surprised by the quality of “The Hankie Project” curated by Julie Barratt. 150 works by 100 artists from 12 countries focused on handkerchiefs as a symbol of grief. It is rare to see an art exhibition with works full of genuine, deep emotion. Of course, there were lots of embroidery and printing on handkerchiefs but Barratt did not allow the exhibition to become repetitive. It is a continuing unfolding experience, intimate, moving and certainly thought provoking about the culture of grief.

The difficulty of expressing profound grief in a culture that no longer deals with death with elaborate rituals and protocol, that in many ways denies death. What to do with the period of mourning? In part “The Hankie Project” is Julie Barratt and the artists expressing their personal grief for the loss of loved ones through creation of these small memorials. But these are not just private memorials but art that is expected to seen by strangers. The sensitivity of the Barratt’s curatorship is evident in the delicate balance of the exhibition creating the sense of not intruding on someone’s grief.

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Street Art Influence

Melbourne’s street art is having an influence on art on exhibition in October at various galleries. There are powerful, fresh artists as diverse as Peter Daverington and young, emerging artist, Hayden Daniel. And Cathy Tipping’s embroided nude, on exhibition at First Site. Tipping used Photoshop for colour separation to determine different threads in the same way the stencil artists use colour separation for separate stencils.

Peter Daverington is exhibiting at Arc One Gallery. Daverington’s style combines the aesthetics of mystical geometry, Nietzsche high-altitude snowy-capped mountains, and hedonistic disco black. This could be a tacky combination in the worst possible taste but Daverington makes it look cool and elegant. His paintings are vast with dynamic geometric forms, reflective mirror planes and glacial mountain views.

The mirror planes divide the space, presenting a mirror opposite view of the same imagined geometry. The mirror is a metaphor for reflection, meditation on the infinite space that Peter Daverington depicts in his paintings. In the exhibition at Arc One Gallery a large dark shiny block in the middle of floor in the gallery reflected Daverington’s wall painting at the far end of the gallery.

The large temporary wall painting in the exhibition is an indication of Daverington’s street art roots. Peter Daverington has been involved in Melbourne’s graffiti art since the 1980s Last year Daverington’s exhibited Reflections of Hyperspace at Until Never. 

High-school student and emerging artist Hayden Daniel is exhibiting in the Sample cabinet at Platform. Splaterdash is a scatter-style exhibition. Daniel’s works in a variety of media: paintings and drawings and a pyramid of plastic creatures. Including a brush in jar of water and spray-can nozzles shows the means of Daniel’s art production. This is scattering is brought together with the main character of this exhibition – Daniel’s chicken man. Daniel previously exhibited at the Lenko Doodle Art Show at No Vacancy.

Melbourne’s street art is a dynamic creative force and will continue to have an influence on a wide variety of artists for many years.