Young Idealists Show Their Wares
Photo: Ron Banks - (l) Graham Hay, (centre) Sofia Scorano, (R) Doikno Pasilan
Title
Young Idealists Show Their Wares
Author / Interviewer
David Bromfield
Abstract / Article
“… There is so much fuss over grants for artists these days one tends to forget that most support their art from their own pockets. This is particularly true of young idealistic artists with no particular ideological axe to grind but a profound belief in the value of their activities. One group of idealists has been established for some time in a warehouse studio in Wellman Street, Northbridge, Perth, Western Australia.
Now with the help of local businesses four of its more recent members Graham Hay, Alexander Hayes, Diokno Pasilan, and Soffia Scarano are exhibiting at Arthouse, in the James Street cultural center. Before the show, I visited the studio, which was dominated by a huge line of upright circular sculptures in various materials, lined up like a parody of a nuclear physics experiment. Creator Hay assured me that despite their bulk they would just fit at Arthouse gallery, in the Perth cultural precinct and indeed they do.
Hay is known for the precision of his work, particularly for the pieces he has sculpted from cut paper pages. The biggest of these was a cut paper spiral weighing four tonnes and installed in the foyer of the High Court of Australia in Canberra earlier this year. The other artists in the group also present a wide variety of exciting objects, all of which deal in some way with cultural displacement being in the wrong place at the right time or vice versa.
This is the first show for textile artist Scarano, whose interest in the measurement of time finds unexpected echoes in the regular rhythmic processes of textile making. Hayes uses all kinds of media, from asphaltum to marble and gold dust, in his two series of mono prints to invoke aspects of Aboriginal presence. Pasilan's more conventional etchings recall a well known legend of the priest's cassock which took on a life of its own.
All the work in the show is well made and, given that it is Christmas, it is interesting to note that it is ridiculously cheap. Many people buy art for the first time in the festive season and a number of galleries offer special exhibitions. Gallery East in North Fremantle, for instance, has a Christmas show with items that range in price from $20 to several thousand. At the bottom end of the market there is an amusingly elegant series of animals snipped from tin by the eccentric artist who calls himself Mr Ovens.
The Khmer heads and hands in sandstone on the wall to the side have an altogether different presence, though they, too, are on a small scale. Any piece of well-carved stone acquires an intensely grave vitality so that even fragments seem to have a life of their own. My favourite pieces included a wall of kimonos of all kinds from a long sleeved young girl's costumein green to sober black male garb fringed with gold and silver embroidery as precisely observed and vital as a design on an ancient lacquer box.
Then, as always, there are some excellent Japanese prints, including a whole suite of figures by Kunisada, in excellent condition. There are also some works by Perth artists, a beautiful ceramic, form by the late Joan Campbell and a wacky beach figure with spinning head by Tony Jones. The RFC Glass Prize at the Craftwest Gallery also offers some inspiration for gift giving. As the exhibition shows, glass has developed into a medium with a wide range of technical possibilities in the last few years. The translucent blue arc of prize-winner Robyn Campbell's Sky Rising, for instance, was produced with fused and lathe-worked glass, while Emma Camden's witty glass box, Passion, from her Boxing a Lover series, was made by lost wax casting, which enables the word passion to float in light held by the lid.
The painting of Jon Plapp at Galerie Dusseldorf offers a very different visual experience. Plapp has been exhibiting in Sydney for two decades but this is the first time his severe but delightful geometric abstractions have been seen in Perth. They come as a pleasant surprise. Plapp is one of those rare abstract painters who sees abstraction as the gate way to a universal sensual delight. His paintings are medium sized and a little like early de Stijl constructivist works in their approach, though with the exception of one or two brilliantly balanced chessboard pieces, he astutely avoids their obvious grid-based structures and their equal weighted lines.
Instead he uses a big rectangle divided by vertical lines in various proportions. The resulting areas are worked in a variety of bright colours and muted greys to create extraordinarily complex rhythms of line, proportion, colour and texture an astonishing fugue built between them. Plapp fine-tunes the fugue by modulating the definition and density of the dividing lines. It is almost impossible to provide a detailed analysis of these works but you can check them out at Galerie Dusseldorf's web site http//www.galeriedusseldorf.com.au. Of course, this is no substitute for the real experience but it might encourage a visit to this delightful exhibition.”
Keywords
exhibition, artists, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, studio. idealists
Publisher
The West Australian
Publication Date
12th December 1998
Week
2
Page
N/A
Section
On Show
Suggested Citation
Bromfield, D. (1998) Idealists Show Their Wares. The West Australian. On Show. Perth, Western Australia.
