Review | VCA Graduate Show 2011

Valentin Palonen
Everyday Alchemy
Mixed media

If you haven’t seen the School of Art Masters exhibition you have sadly missed your chance, it closed on 11 December. You haven’t missed your chance to see some of the works here, however, or to read about them. This is more of a post-review review (holidays and deadlines don’t always mix).

This year’s presentation of the graduating fine artists from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) again struck me with its diversity of approaches and fearless exploration of contemporary themes and materials. This was a sprawling exhibition, extending from the Margaret Lawrence Gallery out into the college studios. This year’s show included the usual amount of video art, sculpture, conceptual art, installations of unexpected materials, photography and a small number of textile works.

Video art pushed the audience’s expectations this year with a range of approaches, two artists who stood out to me were Pip Ryan and Hugh Davis. In Ryan’s work simplistic execution belied a sinister feeling. Several rooms and a darkened hallway were used by the artist. Small screen videos of mechanical rats played in the hallway and a large rat lay upside down in the corner with its wheels exposed. Two videos played opposite each other in one room, a duck quacking and a pig being squeezed to produced its toy sound, they were Quack and Oink. These videos and sculptures were juxtaposed with another unusual mechanical animal - a giant gorilla playing a drum, he was known as Happy Orang. Ryan’s work successfully combines installation and video with an animal theme but leaves the viewer unnerved. I felt unnerved because I felt I’d missed something. Though not similar in animal characters there was an element of Gorge Orwell’s Animal Farm in Ryan’s work, a hierarchy was unaware of. The emphasis on producing toys with lifelike qualities, like voices for example, has the definite potential to unnerve, however, beyond this sensation the installation lacked a strong narrative. Sentina Amato described Ryan’s work in this way:

The animals all projected a sense of wishing they were real. The mouse spining in a crazy sped up circle, determined to become a real mouse with every sharp turn or knock against the wall, the toy duck quaked at unusual intervals; definitely not in a way a programed toy should behave and the gorrila?..let’s just not go there!

Hugh Davis
Electromagnetic Guitars
Video
Image: http://betaaffair.com/

Another video artist, also using a disjointed approach was Hugh Davis. Davis’ video features a single projection comprised of four simultaneous videos, one of the artist and three of guitars being fitted with mobile phones to capture the distorted sound they make. Davis then pounds a microphone into his chest, forming a kind of beat. This work explores ‘a personal relationship and respect for technology’ by elevating the accidental sounds of phone signals interfering with speakers. The artist treats this noise as music while the audience wonders if he is having them on. For me these two examples of video art were memorable for what they didn’t make me feel, this type of video art has the potential to point out a lack of emotion in the viewer - this is the conclusion I came to in the case of Davis and Ryan’s work. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy being unnerved.

Valentina Palonen
Botanical Anthropod Collection (detail)
Pigmented resin

Valentina Palonen also made me uneasy with her gloupy humanoid sculptures. Everyday Alchemy, Imagining New Colours and the Botanical Anthropod Collection elicit a lovely tension between revulsion and intrigue. I was captivated by the slick plasticness of the Anthropods which appeared to be demented carrots cast in plastic and hung on velvet ribbon. I was similarly semi repulsed by the processed applied in Everyday Alchemy, where a human form has been covered, except for the hands, in a pink and blue plastic sludge. The surface is slick, almost wet and the effect disconcerting. This collection of works was a favourite of mine in the show. Palonen successfully captures our emotions with an exploration of life forms similar but alien to us. Her work is so tactile, a quality which goes a long way for audiences of contemporary art. You may have noticed from earlier criticism on this blog that I love participatory artworks and Palonen, among others in the exhibition, is well on her way to achieving this.

Amy Spiers
Spit Chain
Chewing gum, gallery wall

Artworks didn’t come much more participatory than Amy Spiers’ diverse works, near the entrance of the gallery. Spiers’ Say Nothing project, for example, used the willingness of audience members to be involved by asking them to write their mobile number on the wall and when called say nothing. The viewer is asked to call the last number on the list, and when the person at the other end realises who is calling they also say nothing. After these moments of silence the caller crosses off the number and writes their own down. Another of Spiers’ works, titled Spit Chain, asks viewers to help them selves to chewing gum and add it to the wall, ensuring they touch another person’s contribution. The idea here was at first a bit gross but participating proved fun and tasty in the end. I enjoyed the challenge this artist made to the sanctity of the gallery space - eating the telephone calls are two things usually prohibited inside the gallery. Spiers’ artwork continues a tradition within contemporary art which aims to disrupt our ideas about what an audience is and does with the work they are viewing.

Amy Spiers
Spit Chain (detail)
Chewing gum, gallery wall

Another memorable example of such processes is Gonkar Gyatso’s Funky Buddhas (2009) exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art’s ‘6th Asia Pacific Triennial’. The audience, in this case children, were encouraged to stick puffy stickers of popular things like cars, fruit and animals onto the surface of a semi circle of seated white Buddhas. Over the course of the exhibition the work developed so that each day the artwork was completely different.

At the VCA I saw more graduating artists playing with the audiences expectations and participation. Georgie Roxby Smith’s </Your Clothing is Still Downloading>, for example, allows the viewer to control two avatars from Second Life while they have cybersex. Other artists used a less technology heavy approach. Adele Macer, whose work was encountered gradually in different areas of the gallery, reminded me of Anish Kapoor’s sculptures and pleasantly surprised me as I walked through the exhibition. Double Tetrahedron Inverted Wall is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of Kapoor’s Vessel (2007).

Macer created an inverted tetrahedron in a small white room within the gallery, outside this space was a white tetrahedron pointing out of the wall and black tetrahedron, which seemed abandoned on the floor. Triangular flags hung from the ceiling, giving us a clue to the next artwork, which was a black silky triangular pieced quilt, also in a small room somewhere near the back of the upstairs studios. These unobtrusive works were intriguing, they became more and more familiar as I walked through the gallery. These installations were almost confusing in their simplicity, making me wonder ‘why triangles?’ The artist utilised varying materials which were united by this shape, and as the viewer repeatedly encounters them they might wonder, as I did, at the significance of the triangle. Repetition is important to Macer, if her other works are indicative. Perhaps she is asking us to see something simple in a different light, or in a new way, by having us encounter it unexpectedly.

This last observation could certainly hold true for the VCA graduate exhibition as a whole. The graduating artists challenged the role of the audience, as well as what art might be. I saw things unexpected, disconcerting, humorous, pointless, strange and delicate but never boring. It was well curated and the result of two years intense work and as always I look forward to next year’s show.

A review of last year’s graduate show can be read here.

Images: are mine unless otherwise specified. More from the show available on flickr.