Tales of the Unexpected

To dream one’s life in order to live it . . .  Lao Tzu

Tales of the Unexpected: aspects of contemporary Australian art is about the power of the human imagination to dream new worlds into being. It is about engaging with experiences of the real world and transforming them to create poetic, ‘fictional documentaries’. It is about transcending linear time and acknowledging the simultaneity of multiple existences. It is about blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction to illuminate states of being.

Included in the exhibition are some of this country’s most thought-provoking and engaging artists: Kate Beynon, Robert Boynes, Lyndell Brown, Charles Green, Rosemary Laing, Sally Smart and Anne Wallace. Working in quite distinctive ways across a range of media – painting, photography, collage, wall installations and video animation – all the artists invoke performative, theatrical or filmic possibilities in their work, suggesting open-ended tales and dream spaces. Through the inventiveness of their ideas and the unexpected juxtapositions of images and locations, they invite the viewer on journeys of mind and imagination.

Within the flexible framework of ‘fictional documentaries’, the aim of the exhibition is to highlight several remarkable series or groupings of works – to reveal the development of particular ideas through the 1990s and crossing the bridge into a new century. Rather than attempting a wide-ranging survey, the number of artists is deliberately limited to allow for a depth of representation. In some instances the selection takes into account earlier contextual works, while in others the focus is on the intensity of investigation around a specific theme.

The exhibition also takes into account the fluid boundaries between various media in the artists’ works – particularly in relation to painting and photography or cinematic associations. For some of the artists this is revealed through visual and conceptual analogies, while for others it is about direct physical interventions in the process. It is possible, for example, to encounter the ways in which a painting can incorporate still photography and/or recall aspects of film; a photograph can encompass painting or performance, a digital print can be based on drawing for animation, and collage (usually associated with small scale work) can mutate into an evocative, dramatic wall installation.

Interestingly, in a world dominated by technologies, these artists often provide unexpected, distinctly ‘low-tech’ innovations. Many people have, for instance, been deeply surprised that Rosemary Laing’s photographs in her flight research series are not digitally manipulated but instead involved a stunt-performer to enact the dramatic images of the body liberated in space. Also surprising are the photographic Duraclears of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green – large luminous transparencies of their meticulous composite paintings incorporating streams or analogies and art historical references. Kate Beynon, on the other hand, uses video animation in her cross-cultural dialogues as an extension of her drawing, striving to keep a two-dimensional quality in the work (as if the drawings themselves have come to life).

The filmic look of Robert Boynes’s luminous paintings (which include screen-printed photographic images) is informed by intensive reworkings of the painterly surfaces to convey the movement of people through city spaces – as if they are walking or drifting ghost-like through the frame.  In contrast, Anne Wallace’s haunting, theatrical images appear to be forever held in time – the cinematic quality of her paintings relating more to a particular ‘look’, drawing upon a 1950s Hollywood aesthetic to engage with subconscious and psychological realms of human inquiry.

A sense of theatre recalling dream-like fairytale silhouettes and shadow worlds of Goya’s famous etching The sleep of reason produces monsters appear in Sally Smart’s fluid, filmic, unfolding imagery in her Family Tree House installation created specifically for Tales of the Unexpected at the National Gallery of Australia. Here, images of the body, furniture, architecture and natural phenomena, overlap and interweave to spin evocative and fantastic tales.

The diverse artists in Tales of the Unexpected: aspects of contemporary Australian art provide the viewer with much to contemplate. They do not convey narratives with neat beginnings or endings. Rather they suggest something altogether more expansive in the form of fragmentary open-ended tales and dream-like poetic spaces that are part of the endlessly perplexing, entrancing continuum of imaginative and unexpected possibilities that the world has to offer.

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting and Sculpture

Rosemary Laing

I understand the necessary image.
I don’t understand photography.

Instructions:

Idea is everything.
The image exists in relation to the idea.

Beauty is useless.
 It is endlessly desired and entirely useless.
When necessary – exploit beauty – to give the image that which is necessary.

Composition is crap.
When necessary – exploit composition – to trap the gaze of the viewer into the idea.

The image must live.
 It must have a life beyond the problematics of the image itself.

The most inspiring image ever made is Nauman’s Failing to levitate in the studio.
It is everything to do with the crucial paradox of the artist’s intention.
It reveals that the inherent failure of all images is essential to the process,
and, that the images finished along the way never complete the necessary idea.

Rosemary Laing [1]

Flight sits in our consciousness as a kind of fantasy or dream. It is a metaphorical notion. Children dream of flying. It is a very escapist notion to be able to fly. Superheroes fly. Then you’ve got Yves Klein’s Leap into the void. I was interested in unfettering the body from the mechanics of flight. [2]

Rosemary Laing’s photographs are theatrical, staged, performative – suspended midway between fantasy and reality. In her work, she renders the seemingly impossible possible – not through digital manipulation but rather through deliberate, physical interventions. Her canny take on Bruce Nauman’s Failing to levitate in the studio as revealing the essential paradox of the artist’s intention, is given a witty, poignant twist in her levitating images of a bride flying, falling and floating in space, in the flight research series 1998–2000.

Here, the empowerment of flight has everything to do with the artist’s intention, informed over a period of time by intensive research into the mechanics of flight and the desire to overcome the limitations of ‘prosthetic structures’ of travel in relation to the body. It is about giving substance to the impossibility of the dream of human flight, and the enabling of the body in space. Along with the realisation of the liberated body, comes a sense of the ‘necessary incompletion’ of the idea – of flight with no landing; the images remaining forever held in time and space.

Laing’s fascination with flight began when she moved to a studio in Leichardt, Sydney under the flight path, around 1994. From the initial frustrations she felt with the omnipresence of transit above her head, she became seduced by the ideas around air travel, generating a complex body of art. The process included working with Qantas at the international flight terminal (brownwork 1997); later entering into the intricate machinations of space travel through a period of research at NASA. Subsequently in Laing’s video, spin 1997–98, we are taken into the motion of flight – as the photographer, strapped into an open-air Tiger Moth aircraft, films the action of flying, diving, stalling and spinning over the Blue Mountains.

spin is the precursor to the flight research series. Laing spent considerable time finding the right location in the Blue Mountains to stage the series. To create these images she worked closely initially with stunt coordinator, Grant Page, and then more closely with stunt performer, Gillian Statham, both of whom have long histories in the making of significant action films in Australia. Laing was interested in the limitations placed on the body in our daily lives and engaged in fruitful discussions with Page about fearlessness and the way that the stunt person’s body is brought into a direct, unmediated interaction with the world, engendering a sense of ‘euphoria, empowerment and even relief’.

I had a very interesting conversation with Grant Page (who had been helping me to work out various issues in relation to the stunt) which led me to think more about physical atrophy. The more one’s experience is mediated and enabled in another way, the more a certain defunctionalising happens. You don’t actually walk anywhere as much – so you are always experiencing the world through, for example, the screen of a car or through the television screen. [3]

In flight research #1 1998, a woman is suspended from a twisting ladder hanging down from an aircraft over a verdant, ‘primordial terrain’. Against the danger of falling, she gazes resolutely up towards an uncertain future. In the ensuing images she is transformed into a world beyond the everyday, dressed in a bridal gown, becoming acrobatic, leaping into the void. Her body is shown undergoing extreme motion, ‘actually suspended within “flight” itself’ – between the earth and the immensity of all that is out there’. In one of the most spectacular images, flight research #5 1999, the bride appears mesmerising, like a billowing cloud floating in the expansive blue sky. As in flight research #6 1999­–2000, in which she is diving swan-like across the panoramic landscape, the bride appears paradoxically, eerily still – as if time and motion have been suspended.

Only days before the photographic shoot, Laing decided upon the idea of a bridal gown. She recognised that to achieve what she was aiming for, she needed to enter the realms of a representational form which would provoke recognition that was outside of the ordinary. The serendipity of finding a gown that invoked Elizabethan memories was not lost on the artist. It provided a way of reclaiming the feminine image of the bride from the many male interpretations of the subject in 20th-century art history and having fun with it on her own terms. On another level the dress was a significant aspect of bringing another layer of complexity to the series: taking into account past histories in Australia and the need for ‘a symbolic new engagement in terms of how we image ourselves in this landscape at this point in time’. As opposed to previous incursions and impositions on the land, she suggests a ritualistic new ‘contract’ that is more open-ended; still precarious perhaps but one that implies, in her own words, ‘the optimism of promises that should be kept’.

Whatever ecstatic moments or tribulations may lie ahead for the bride is part of another tale or fabrication. In this poetically charged, unforgettable flight research series, we remain suspended within the imaginary world of flight – within the realms of the body liberated in space, within the flow of freewheeling possibilities and untrammelled wonder.

Anne Wallace

He has passed into wakefulness. The door to the hallway, the latch not quite seated, has been swinging back and forth as if at a ghostly touch, clicking, nudged by the drafts that circulate through the house now that the cooling weather has turned on the furnace.. . . The sharp noise rings through the silent house. Not quite silent: the furnace sighs, the refrigerator throbs. His mother in the next room sleeps with a man not his father. It used to be his parents’ room, he used to hear them cutting up some nights, making more noise than they thought. The two front bedrooms are empty, staring out at a Joseph Street bare of traffic. Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

John Updike [1]

I think that the childhood intuition that things are beyond our understanding is one that we later cover over with certainties that maybe make life easier to live, but which cut us off from our potential to be moved by our own predicament as humans. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is when we are faced with the limitations of our own understanding that we are most alive.

Anne Wallace [2]

Anne Wallace’s paintings convey ambiguities at the heart of human experience. Wallace is interested in creating images that are about something not shown, ‘that are not finally readable in spite of all the signs of narrative being present’. Her works spring from certain themes and mythologies, ‘myths that we may be familiar with, which have accumulated a kind of cultural power’. Evocative and provocative, they are imbued with a sense that time has been forever stilled. It is as though beneath the surface of these haunting, dream-like works, resides a repressed energy and emotion, on the verge of exposure.

In Wallace’s intimate painting Pensive girl 1992, the inanimate becomes animate as a dancing pair of scissors suggests the incisive shaping of imaginary worlds. In The exhibitionist 1993, the girl herself becomes performative – a contortionist exposed to the gaze of a group of male spectators, entrapped in an arena that recalls De Chirico’s empty, yet claustrophobic spaces. As in much work around the early 1990s, Exemplar 1993 (page 47) suggests the uneasy passage between youth and adulthood, focusing on girls and their implied psychological interactions with each other and the world.

In the course of a period spent at the Slade School of Art in London (1994–96), Wallace felt the need to reassess her sense of direction. This corresponded with her growing awareness of how complex and strange life actually is. She recalls that seeing films such as Marguerite Durras’s India Song made her realise ‘how powerful, mysterious and “nonsensical” artwork like that could be’. In paintings such as Boudoir 1997, Wallace creates a world imbued with subtle mystery and, in this instance, with a sense of the presences of those who may once have occupied this empty bed, sealed in its luxuriant satin sheen cover. The combination of attraction and alienation has now become integral to the artist’s manipulation of her images inhabiting close-up viewpoints. 

A sense of enclosure and of unknown forces informs Sight unseen 1996 (cover image), in which water creeping from under a closed door recalls the palpable, heightened tension of Hitchcock films. At times there is a feeling of a camera lens observing the action from behind, as in Late home 2001 – gazing with the close-up man and the viewer (or voyeur) through a screen at a Lee Remmick lookalike who is, in turn, facing us with the moon in her eyes. While there is something of the mood of Edward Hopper’s paintings in the work, the artist points out that, unlike Hopper, she is not a chronicler of her own times but rather draws upon a particular look and atmosphere to enable her to enter into aspects of human experience.

I have ‘lifted’ a style and transplanted it, certainly, but I have not done so out of some sense of nostalgia. In fact, the very subject of my painting is the unattainability of ‘glamour’ – a trope for an idealised existence free from pain, boredom, dross; and which we might associate with some representations of 50s America, specifically with Hollywood. It is a visual style with which I am not alone in finding myself fascinated, but it is one which I also feel alienated by. This sense of simultaneous fascination and alienation is, I would argue, what we derive from many things in life – especially art, religion, romantic love. [3]

The trope of glamour and questioning of identity is central to Wallace’s memorable painting She Is 2001. Recalling Colin McCahon’s famous painting I AM, she raises questions of self-identity, of the struggle to establish a sense of self in a world of illusions. In this image of a woman writing with lipstick on the bathroom mirror, Wallace is not suggesting that she is leaving a message for another (lover?) but rather that the dialogue is with the self. As she writes:

What I hope will be the effect of her slightly mad eye is to suggest that in fact she is writing a message to herself. Just as we all at times require mirrors to convince ourselves that we exist, this woman would seem to be suffering a crisis of identity which has led her, beyond her  attempt of proving the fact of her existence via the mirror, to seek certainty through words. But here the letter ‘I’ is only half-formed . . . 

Who has not looked into a mirror and been disturbed at the lack of self-recognition, the uncanny sense that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we do not in fact exist? When the seamless normality of our lives is at times interrupted for whatever reason, the mirror becomes proof that we are the impostor while the reflection that stares back is somehow the ‘real’ us, to whom we have no access. [4]

This crossover between the real and illusory is at one with an art that is deliberately non-naturalistic and theatrical. While Wallace has an interest in film, she is as much fascinated by literature; by writers like John Updike, Kenneth Anger (with works such as Hollywood Babylon) and James Ellroy. What is significant to her art practice is not their narratives as such but rather the mood engendered by their ideas and ways of writing, allowing her to re-conjure her own visual take on the world.

Exploring themes of love, anxiety, childhood and the search for identity, Anne Wallace does not finally present us with images of certainty. Instead she creates spaces for questioning and for contemplating the profound, inexhaustible ambiguities of human experience.

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green

The story of castaways of the Western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity who, like the heroes of Verne and Stevenson, one day reach a mysterious deserted island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery, of truth that is to say. Whereas the Odyssey of Ulysses was a physical phenomenon, I filmed a spiritual odyssey: the eye of the camera watching these characters in search of Homer replaces that of the gods watching over Ulysses and his companions.

Jean-Luc Godard [1]

The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands . . . never coming to an end. [2]

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green invoke illusory worlds in their art that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present, active engagement and meditative states of being. Their art involves the re-creation and layering of images from different contexts and timeframes – all drawn from their encounters with museums and research centres; from books, journals, postcards and electronic media – to create new composite realities. The flow of ideas across early and new media is heightened by their repeated references to the treasure-troves of books and to the multiple references ‘nesting’ in each work.

The dream-like qualities and unexpected correspondences within their works relate to cultural memory, to memory as archive, and to reclaiming the ghosts of the past. The artists’ collaboration, which began in the late 1980s, has involved the sharing of ideas and the blurring of the individual hand and personal identity. As Lyndell Brown notes, it was as if somehow in the process a third hand was able to emerge which in turn connected with those of previous generations.

After having abandoned painting for a time around the mid-1990s, Brown and Green returned to the process of meticulously reworking images as they had done in their visually and conceptually layered work, The nervous system 1995. Here, their trompe l’oeil representation of a book – an 18th-century medical text they had collected – lies open at a diagram of the central nervous system alongside an old piazza in Italy. The book floats over an aerial view of contemporary Melbourne, looking across the city towards Williamstown and Port Phillip Bay at dusk. A few years later, at the beginning of the 21st century, the artists again re-created ‘forgotten works’, often placing them in Melbourne or Sydney.

The significant new dimension in Brown and Green’s artistic process has been to photograph their paintings, which are then printed from high resolution scans, without digital manipulation, onto transparent Duraclear film. These reinventions appear quite magical, like giant lantern slides. Their luminosity, transparency and drop-shadows across walls render them at once luminous and ghostly. The initial painting process involves subtle shifts in the interpretation of the archival sources, and this enables the intimacy of a sensual connection, which remains embedded in the transparencies. The process of photographing the paintings brings an additional unifying effect, accentuating an entrancing, theatrical other-worldliness.

This is apparent in the hauntingly beautiful Duraclear photograph, Sleep 2 2000–01. The predominant image is of two reclining Japanese women swathed in delicately patterned fabric. It is derived from a photograph taken by Felice Beato in his studio in Yokohama in Japan in the 19th century. Charles Green notes that Beato was the first foreign photographer to produce folios of views in Japan. Further, part of what is so intriguing about the image is the way it has been carefully, deliberately constructed. As Green points out: ‘This is obviously a simulation of sleep since the sisters are posed in Beato’s brightly lit studio, but we are alerted to the subject by the props – the lantern and the pipe nearby. They have become Madame Butterfly stand-ins.’ The ‘sleeping’ women are set against the mystical blue of Sydney Harbour just before nightfall. This adds to the theatricality of the whole, suffused with the ambience of a dream in which fantastic images from different places and times coexist.

Floating in the sky of Sleep 2 is a trompe l’oeil book, opened at a page illustrating one of Yves Klein’s famous performances, his first Anthropometrie, in which a woman smeared in blue paint is the active protagonist, creating an art work with her naked body. This image is also at the centre of another work, Psyche 2000–01. Here, she is set against a fragment of a Claude Lorrain painting of Psyche, in the National Gallery in London. This Duraclear is clearly focused on the representation of contradictory states – of active engagement and contemplation – and this was the criteria in the selection of imagery. The notion of specific imagery overlapping and unfolding not only within each work but from one work to another – the concept of the dynamogram that the artists have located in iconologist Aby Warburg’s late writing – suggests the profound continuity of experience implicit in Brown and Green’s art.

In Ghost 2000–01 the open book that floats in front of the same Klein performance includes re-creations of Edvard Munch’s photographs – a self-portrait and a portrait of Rosa Meissner at the Hotel Rohne in Warnemünde, Germany, 1907, in which the model stands alongside a luminous apparition. On the facing page, the image is obscured by shadow. Although Munch stated in his famous aphorism, ‘The camera cannot compete with the brush or palette so long as it cannot be used in heaven or hell’, he did make use of photography throughout his career. For him, photography was essentially ‘a medium of meditation’ in which time was never fleeting but flowed through his photographs. They were images in which the real and the illusory often appear to inhabit the same space.

Brown and Green’s art reinvents such illusions and phantoms. Their particular form of conjuring involves the retrieval of iconic or lost images, setting up ‘streams of analogy, like cultural matrixes’. The integration of analogous images in their art may be likened to pre-modern cabinets of curiosity, open to continuous reinvention. The archives that inform their works are also integral to the contemporary world of real and virtual travel, of exchanges across geographical boundaries. The illusion in their art is as much to do with the crossover of media as with the creation of spaces for contemplation, in a spirit of continuous collaboration and conversation. As Lyndell Brown says, ‘It is almost like this huge village of artists has created us. It feels to us as if we are part of a city of voices, all talking to each other.’

Kate Benyon

The Python appeared. Its head was as large as a rice barrel, its eyes were like mirrors two feet across. Smelling the fragrance of the rice balls, it started to swallow them. Then Li Ji unleashed the dog which bit hard into the python. Li Ji herself came from behind and hacked several times at the python with her sword, wounding it in several places. The wounds hurt so terribly that the python leapt into the courtyard before the temple and died.

Li Ji went into the cave and recovered the skulls of the nine victims. She sighed as she brought them out, saying, ‘For your timidity you were devoured. How pitiful!’ Slowly she made her way homeward. 

Gan Bao [1]

All writers [creators] must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past . . . The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience . . . the realm of change. [2]

Kate Beynon engages with fantastic tales of the unexpected in her art. Since 1996, her work across a wide range of media has been inspired by an ancient Chinese story by Gan Bao, Li Ji: The girl who killed the python, included in the text In Search for Marvels, set in Fujian, China, in the Jin Dynasty (AD 317–420). A historian in the court of the Eastern Jin Emperor Yuan, Gan Bao wrote stories ‘left over from history’, compiling them into a collection that is regarded as an important example of the zhiguai (strange tales) genre, ‘recording’ extraordinary characters in a style that mimicked historical writing. [3]

For Beynon, who has long been interested in language as a form of mimicry and encoded symbols, the re-telling of the tale of Li Ji, a ‘warrior girl’ who triumphs over evil, presented the opportunity to merge personal and collective stories and histories as a way of reflecting on issues of mixed cultural heritage in contemporary society. Of the original story Beynon writes:

Li Ji lives in a mountain village menaced by a giant python that ritually eats young girls every year. After many deaths, Li Ji pretends to sacrifice herself as the next victim (as an expendable daughter), but instead takes a sword and a snake-hunting dog, and slays the python. As a reward she is made queen of a local kingdom. Interpretations of the meaning of this story are varied – from female bravery and heroism to a conservative fairytale ending in luxury and questionable happiness. [4]

There are personal associations for the artist with her adaptation of the story of Li Ji. Born in Hong Kong, Beynon has lived in Australia since the age of four, experiencing the hybrid world of two cultures. A number of the books that were left by her grandfather in her family home were bilingual, incorporating Chinese and English text, the punctuation of the latter – question marks and exclamation marks – often surfacing in the Chinese counterparts. As an adult she also became fascinated by the implications of language across cultures.

In numerous inventive ‘wall drawings’ comprised of chenille sticks (pipe cleaners), Beynon created delicate, fuzzy Chinese characters (sometimes decipherable, sometimes incomprehensible) relating to travel guide and textbook phrases such as ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where do you come from?’. When grouped together, they may also sound like the interrogation of a foreign culture. In works such as Excuse Me! 1997, in the National Gallery’s collection, she twists the inquisitive into the exclamatory, reclaiming the power of language. The idea of taking control, of overcoming ritual humiliations incurred in relation to language, corresponds with Li Ji’s triumph over adversity.

In her video animation Li Ji: Warrior Girl 2000, Beynon focuses in part on the action at the heart of the story – the victory against the odds of the young Li Ji over the demonic python (also a metaphor for negative forces in Australian society). This is interwoven with Li Ji, a young Chinese–Australian woman, living in contemporary Melbourne who is the reincarnation of the girl in the tale. As she travels through the metropolis of her current home, past arcades and construction sites sprayed with graffiti, her memory of the past is provoked by the presence of a diasporic Chinese culture (for example, coming across a Chinese barbecue shop in Chinatown) or by signs of racism (a stencilled map of Australia on the city’s walls with the word ‘full’ written across it). [5] In the course of these encounters, Li Ji experiences flashbacks to her former life and her courage is reignited.

In the process of merging the past and present lives of Li Ji , Beynon reflects upon racism and the dream of coexistence. Along with a critique of contemporary society, there is a sense of the liberating confidence of youth, of ‘girl power’, towards a more inclusive, compassionate future. As Beynon notes: ‘This work is aimed at asserting a positive view toward a hybrid Australian existence, and a sense of belonging within a mixed and multi-layered identity.’

In her chenille stick wall drawings, video animation, digital photographic prints and recent paintings, Beynon draws upon a variety of sources: Chinese text and calligraphy, traditional Chinese art, cartoon and comic book graphics (including Japanese manga) and graffiti art. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on the two dimensional surface that relates to her ongoing interest in drawing.

Beynon’s fascination with the symbolic resonances of dress, with the fabric of cultural expression, so apparent in her earlier installations, resurfaces in her current work – for example, in the Chinese apparel of the woman from the early tale in Li Ji and her Dog at the Longevity Tree 2002 and the informality and directness of the contemporary Li Ji in Welcome 2001.

Across the broad spectrum of her work, Beynon’s interest in time-travel across different locations and cultures reveals her interest in probing the fluid exchanges of cross-cultural experience. In her vibrant, deliberately cartoon-like images she suggests that the recovery of the ghosts of past lives in fantastic tales can perhaps empower us, ignite imagination, illuminate our present consciousness.

Sally Smart

I imagine thinking about the meanings of the world; inevitably the discourse begins with the body, a forensic activity, an external and internal examination of the body environment: clothes, house, furniture, landscape. This becomes an anatomy lesson; where dissected parts are examined and reconstructions are made for explanations. Inevitably the conclusion is like a puzzle-picture: a maze of fugitive parts; landscape parts become human parts: but whether the lines, shapes and colours appear abstract or representational there is an assemblage of parts. However, the composition is unstable, a chimera: the picture is impaired.

Sally Smart 

Sally Smart has long been interested in the unstable, the illusory and the uncanny. As opposed to certainty or perfectibility, her interest is in the realms of shadows, symptoms, dreams, mutations, subconscious memories and spooks that haunt the mind’s equilibrium. This is revealed in fantastic images that trigger associations and partial recollections of things encountered in the course of life’s journey: entrancing phantoms from tales told to us in childhood (in which, perhaps, inanimate objects became magically alive); puppet-plays; the shadows of trees silhouetted on moonlit nights; medical diagrams or X-rays of the body; moths swooping in towards the light.

To attain her cumulative, fragmentary worlds of fantastic possibilities Smart has drawn inspiration from a wide range of sources including Surrealism and Dadaism. Working across different media such as painting, collage and multi-layered installations, her preoccupation with cutting and fabricating also alludes to a long-held commitment to feminism and the desire to take risks and transcend boundaries. This relates to Smart’s earlier study of women in 19th-century literature and to her work such as Spiderartist (Sew me) 1989, from her X-ray Vanitas series, investigating constructions of feminine identity (in this instance developing ideas about the poet Emily Dickinson who described herself as a ‘literary seamstress’). 

Smart’s fascination with domestic spaces intertwined with the ways that women have been represented in history and literature, recurred in her exhibition The Unhomely Body in 1996 drawing upon Max Ernst’s collages, Une Semaine de Bonté 1933. Each of the canvases in this exhibition focused on the idea of a room such as The Sewing Room (Prosthetic) and The Anxiety Room (Stain) reflecting the fact that the ambiguous relationship between real and representational space extended to the blurring of architectural, psychological and bodily functions. In her lively engagement with psychoanalysis, Smart plays on the uncanny, making associations with the Freudian idea of the unhomely (unheimlich), of something familiar made unsettling and strange.

In two of Smart works on canvas, In Bed with H.H. (Femmage) and BedBugs(Femmage) 2001, she takes familiar motifs such as beds and parts of the human body, and unites and transforms them in ways that are surprising and unfamiliar. Here, the legs at the bed-ends have become women’s legs, animating the static forms into arenas in which dreams appear literally to take flight. Occupying both beds are collaged portraits of Dada artist Hannah Höch. In the instance of BedBugs(Femmage), delicately patterned elements of real and fake collage are played off against the witty inclusion of a giant ‘bed bug’ under the covers.  In these transmutations of the bed – a place of sleep, love, sex and dreams – the grotesque, the beautiful and the marvellous are one.

In her installation of cut-outs, Conversation piece #1 2002, Smart adopts the tradition of silhouette and gives it a contemporary twist. Based on the profiles of friends and family, the painted felt silhouettes are accompanied by small numerals, suggesting diagrams in anatomical texts and 18th-century cabinets of curiosity. However, their random placement  (at times back-to-front) and seemingly illogical sequencing, alludes to the unpredictability of imaginative discourse and human behaviour. This idea is amplified in the often weird appendages that emerge from the heads, recalling, in turn, Marina Warner’s comments in her book No Go the Bogeyman:

In several cases popular artefacts and writings adopt and cherish the metamorphoses of the insect world for the same purpose as the creatures themselves: to scare off predators . . . [The images] revealingly mix and shuffle elements from varying species, extrapolate from a stag beetle’s antlers and a fly’s feelers, a crab’s claw and a pig’s snout to create fantastic new hybrids, the modern chimerae of celluloid nightmares. [1]

The metamorphic, performative dimension in Smart’s large installation Family Tree House (Shadows and Symptoms) 1999–2002, is integral to the act of cutting, splicing, pinning and manipulating multiple fragments across spaces in unfolding free-form tales and ‘conversations’. In this work she suggests affiliations between the homely and unhomely, as the familiar becomes unfamiliar; as body parts, a giant moth, aspects of domestic life and architectural features are woven around and spin off the image of the tree. The recurring motif of the tree in Smart’s work over a number of years provides the axis for ongoing images of her theatre of mind and imagination. This feeling for nature is partly informed by her memories of growing up in the Australian countryside – on a farm near the rural town of Quorn in South Australia. The tree also alludes to ideas of the family tree, the tree house and the tree of life.

Along with the strong visual impact of the imagery in Sally Smart’s work, it is the richness of implication, triggering an array of conscious and subconscious associations, that gives her work its poetic resonance, depth and potency. The element of risk-taking is ever-present – apparent in the scope of Family Tree House (Shadows and Symptoms) her recent quite magical installation of multiple overlapping parts, climbing a wall of dizzying height – invoking multiple unexpected permutations and impossibly fantastic tales.

Robert Boynes

It is like Godard’s idea that what is important is what comes before and after the movie. It is the implication that this is just a slice of a continuing action . . . I think this is one of the reasons I allow myself to work with moving figures – to create this implication that something has come before and something will happen after. The scene is a particular chink of the action that you look through – a privileged moment in a continuum.

Robert Boynes [1]

It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that, whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself. [2]

Dream-like, filmic possibilities inform Robert Boynes’s recent paintings of urban environments. They suggest ‘fictional documentaries’, drawing on observations of contemporary urban life and transmuting them into atmospheric fictions.

In overview, Boynes’s art over the past three decades has shifted in emphasis between the documentary and the fictional: moving from overt socio-political work towards more abstract interventions, from the shimmering data of cities seen from above to close-up viewpoints of figures in city-spaces. There are significant continuities throughout: a passionate engagement with the art-making process, with film and with the human condition reflected through the prism of urban experience.

In the initial stages of making his recent urban paintings, Boynes photographed people in cities. He was not interested in the identity of individuals but rather in conveying archetypal urban dwellers. After taking hundreds of photographs, he would then rigorously select, edit and transform a particular image: scanning it into the computer, relaying it via a large silk-screen to the canvas and vigorously reworking the whole in the painting process. The photographic images are like sketchbook notations for Boynes. They also remain as vital documentary trace elements in the work. It is, however, in process of manipulating the painterly surface on canvas – dragging the screen in the wet paint, scrubbing and washing the surface back to the point of erasure and rebuilding it with successive layers and glazes – that the work attains its distinctive fugitive aura and luminosity.

Rendez-vous 2000 is one of the paintings that originated during a residency Boynes undertook at Artspace in Sydney’s bustling Woolloomooloo. It was a fruitful but difficult time. The artist notes that the area was under construction, so there was only a quiet period of a maximum of three hours each day. ‘It drove me mad at the time . . . but that sense of continuous activity gradually filtered into the work. I was observing the pattern of people, moving up and down, to and from the CBD . . . They had an urgency about them.’

The environments that Boynes’s figures inhabit in the works are spaces of transit and exchange: crossings, walkways, escalators, stairways and subway stations. He notes that these are spaces that no one owns, that everyone has a right to use. They can also be lonely, dangerous spaces. ‘They conceal an undercurrent of disturbance, yet they are spaces that we all need. I try to make those spaces as central and visually engaging as I can.’ Works such as Rendez-vous 2000, Pyrmont 2002 and After hours 2002 suggest open-ended possibilities of people coming and going via these ambient city spaces. It is the implication of life beyond a particular ‘frame’ that is of utmost significance to the artist.

Another significant aspect of Boynes’s work is the repetition of elements from one work to another – each with their own nuances, giving the feel of sequential film frames or different takes on the same scene. Among the repeated motifs he has used over the years is the screening device of the louvre window or venetian blind, as in the extraordinarily subtle Rear window 2001, with the implication being of something secret or mysterious occurring beyond our vision.

To attain the qualities he is searching for, Boynes often puts two or three fragments together in the same work. For The ghosts of Grand Central and the ensuing larger painting Grand Central Station 2001, he initially stood on balconies at each end of the station in New York, photographing the many people walking through.

Those people would probably be deeply surprised that they have ended up rebuilt into something that is an amalgam of all the emotions going through that space. When I’m photographing people I almost want to hold my hand up and say, ‘I’m sorry, I am not photographing you’. Then the shutter goes ‘click’ and it seems like a lie. It seems as if I’m stealing their image but that is only a point of departure. What I’m doing in reworking the images later on, is finding another spirit that stands for something more than the specific individual.

Through shifting, grainy, blurring passages of luminosity and shadow, of figures moving across city environments set against ambient cursive neon signs, rushing to a rendezvous or drifting ghost-like through the wet streets at night, Boynes’s fragmentary ‘fictional documentaries’ illuminate imagination. They reveal people enmeshed in the momentum of life, passing on their journeys in the here and now and across generational divides. What Boynes ultimately suggests in his evocative urban spaces is that, in the many arbitrary aspects of daily life, there are possibilities for glimpsing something of the inherent energy, continuity and illusive mystery underlying human experience and memory. As he remarked about the making of Times Square: 

It was raining like mad and I kept trying to shoot in that low light. The figure on a bicycle was moving through . . . a shrouded figure – I just liked the motion of the wheels on the zebra crossing and the light. The scene became transformed in the painting process. It is a memory that just ghosts its way across the crossing and then it’s gone.