- Venue
- TART Contemporary
- Location
Some kind of unstructured modifications/Tart elastics
This show suggests a kind of psychological analytical theatre, a stage set full of poignant ‘props’ (that quietly talk to each other, their own script, part improvisation, a devise for multiple conversations), a memory time machine flipping between the past and the future. It is, on one reading, a confrontation of the recent history of this gallery space and a springboard for future developments; it is taking stock and moving forward, a new blank page but with erased marks, traces of its past thoughts and ideas, discarded or rewritten or reassembled, rethought to understand the spatial and conceptual and rational dimensions of the gallery, the headspace, connections, impulses and thoughts it generates, the vision it offers, its motivation to present.
Three Years and Counting features a range of artist who have presented at the gallery in its short history, it is a fusion and distillation of its curatorial conclusions and processes, it is shaped by a kind of special interrogation at specific previous shows and hopes to offer up a challenge to their origination and their intent in order to move forward. It is, in short, a kind of internal critique by way of severe scrutiny and self-criticism in order to manifest its future as a gallery. It is a difficult show; it’s a difficult set-up full of tense humor, beautiful anger, flamboyant details, nervous affection and is strengthened by its process of self-deliberation, its motivation to understand itself. (It is a model and procedure other galleries might consider before switching themselves on to the next big things, the next fashionable rising stars.)
A number of film and video artists appear on a crown set monitor (as if to suggest the significance the gallery places on video): Graham Fagen, Duncan Campbell, Torsten Lauschmann among other screen work that ripple outwards: voices, songs and images that find root and corresponding values with the objects, drawings, paintings and media works situated around the space. Special mention to Oliver Farley’s performance document and drawings, violent and joyful, restrained and explosive at the same time; to Museum of Viral Memories’ cheap maquette of a silver submarine replete with rubbish handwriting and silly stickers; to Eric Doeringer’s Richard Prince painting, a controlled and respectful fakery; to Daryl Waller’s video animation that pierces the space with rhythmic projectile precision; to Meredyth Spark’s silver tape black and white rock and roll figurative ‘removal’ and to a sub-plot of Spiritual America, which colors it with a sense of the poetic, romantic and political.
There is the sensation of a celebratory mode in this show, which despite it being selections of past presentations, stands on its own merits as a sturdy collage of actions, complexities and experiences. There is also a simmering insistence to the work, from magnifications of near-invisible fleeting moments and surfacing thoughts to profound considerations on themes of war, abuse and death. It, in its convergence, has vibrant texture: it’s like elastic – sharp, controlled, flexible, it pulls and stretches back towards the past, springing forward towards an evocative future.
