761m2

Documenting the social landscape, the often superficial politicking surrounding our urban social structures and the natural environment has been a central concern for the visual arts throughout history. Our landscape, the suburban sprawls mushrooming in our native ‘back yards’, the fluorescence of stringlines and demarcations beacons of progress and urban conformity is translated and reconstructed in the current exhibition 761M2.

A constantly shifting viewer/object relationship is implicit in Bevan Honey’s art practice. The works acquire physical presence through use of perspective devices and surface textures. The highly polished surfaces act like mirrors shaping the beginnings of a dialogue between the observer, the work and the space they both inhabit.

The use of line and wood are pivotal to this new body of work. The correlation of these two elements is introduced in Split I and Split II. An apple tree, a typically European colonial symbol, is split in half, re-conjoined with each half reflected back on itself, to form two distinct images. By the simple act of deconstructing and reconstructing a single form a new image is created, as similarly throughout history urban settlements have attempted to manipulate nature into a contrived copy of itself.

S, SE, E, NE, N, NW, W, SW are rotational views of the artist’s shed rafters each drawn at 45°angles within a 360° circle. These works invite us to wrestle with our Australian post-colonial history, with our personal and collective realities through the use of metaphors, in this case the humble shed. A suburban icon, on the one hand a symbol of suburban conformity while on the other a romantic almost sacred place for the DIY enthusiast, the Eldorado of suburban creativity and fantasy. This duality is explored through the use of a fixed subject; the shed and a shifting focus; the artist. Each cardinal point redrawn with a marginal shift in perspective, remains inevitably recognisable. The use of charcoal, a natural element is juxtaposed to the industrial inorganic MDF wood. The charcoal staining enriches the surface but not the subject. The only human element is the freehand drawing, the hand marks on the surface. The density of the pigment is loose and thin accentuating a sense of fragility and transience.

The linear framework in Stringlines is made up of 90 horizontal lines per work forming a sequence of 4 parts, each referencing a cardinal point. The cardinal directions are important geographic descriptors mapping references and measurements of location.. The line made using builders’ string and chalk refers to the customary delineation of our space, the way we map, cloister, segment and given meaning to our surroundings. Underlying much of what we do are empirical formulas, data based rationales that often go against the natural grain. The process of flicking chalk onto the surface is a measured act yet each action leads to a different result; geometric precision is coupled with the unknown element of chance and results in rhythmic but variable surface textures.

This process coupled with the use of an ‘Yves Klein’ blue pigment infers a rationalisation of the ‘sublime’ or metaphysical, possibly inferring that our manipulation of the world extends outside our immediate physical environment.

After the illustration, Instruction I and Illustration form a three way reading. After the illustration is a metaphorical shelter from belief systems, conformity and rules of judgement. Sitting on milk crates, still in kit form it investigates the stretch between the actual and the ideal, reality and desire. After the illustration relates to the highly polished Illustration, where the tension between ‘ideal’ and ‘actual’ is exposed. The scaffolded structure bears little resemblance to the construction. In both cases the scaffolding structure is devoid of any aesthetic or decorative detail it remains a purely formulated equation. The sequence of the relational dialogue between the works extends to Illustration. The ‘real’ illustration hangs distant from the unassembled components of the cruciform construction.
The exhibition as a whole challenges us to wrestle with the parallels between an empirical and an actual environment, to investigate the means by which our western contemporary culture irreverently approaches the reshaping of our personal and collective realities through the use of contemporary metaphors.

Paola Anselmi

August 2003