Firstdraft Exhibition: Haining/Platt/Karageorgos/McMaster
17 March – 1 June 2013
By Denise Thwaites
Firstdraft Gallery’s current exhibition provides an encounter with the work of four artists united by unlikely common ground. Through diverse means, their work exploits the potentialities of thresholds, tipping points and critical junctures. Despite this liminal thread, however, these exhibiting artists could not be more different.
Kevin Platt’s irony-laced body of work operates in the fertile space between the serious and utterly silly. The artist describes his process as “working with materials for which he has a general distaste, and under the steam of motivations that appal him.” Launching from this splintered artistic basis, the aesthetic contrast of his works, which utilise clay, plant-matter, neon, glass and felt, are testament to the productive potential of Platt’s polarised and self-deprecating artistic process. However, while Platt accepts the potentially “purposeless” or “unloved” status of his work, the title of Platt’s body of work Criticism belies a more earnest and subtle understanding of the terms of artistic engagement. The viewer gets a glimpse into this in Platt’s work Performance Maker, The Omelette. Composed of a series of photographic slides projecting, among others, images of grumpy cats, naïve hand drawings, bright parakeets, viciously corrected assignments and images of a shirtless Platt himself (in what appears to be the process of cooking pancakes), from the frame of these projections sprout large-scale, felt arms and legs, which are spread wide-open, poised like a willing target. Beyond a purely comic device, this frame may be read as a subtle jibe at the vulnerability of the artwork to the slings and arrows of criticism. Indeed, Platt renders the audience unsure as to whether Criticism is, as it promises, a sincerely light-hearted exercise in distaste, or in the end, a nuanced meditation on critique.
By contrast, directly facing Platt’s work are the vivid digital print and watercolour works of Rebecca Karageorgos. The images mix portraiture with phantasmagoria, demonstrating the artist’s penchant for contemporary imaging techniques and manipulation. Entitled Paradiso, the works operate between horror and fairytale, the artist describing them as collapsing boundaries of fiction and reality. Two of her works speak directly to painterly traditions of mythical representation; the gazing youth of Michael (aquababe) (2013) recalling Caravaggio’s depiction of the myth of Narcissus, and the bloody suspension wings of Liam (2MA BOI) (2013), invoking images of the biblical story of Lucifer. The disturbing content of the work is juxtaposed by the artist’s play with aesthetic beauty, this tense opposition heightening the unsettling qualities of the work.
This show also includes the work of the latest Firstdraft Studio resident, Andrew Haining. The work’s title Metanoia, denotes a decisive mental turning point or change of heart; this title providing a vital clue into the work’s major concern with transformation. Haining’s mixed sculptural installation pieces composed of MDF, pine, digital photography, acrylic, polystyrene, rope and soap, are both closed off and open to the audience. Their minimal form and insulating orientation create a sense of barrier to the work, which the visitor must penetrate in order to enter its space. Once within the installation, however, the visitor encounters work which is half constructed or deconstructed, objects and images that are seemingly unfinished or in a process of becoming or deteriorating. The artist suggests that through this interstitial space a “radical future emerges,” hinting at the influence of deconstructive thought upon his practice. Like Derrida’s texts, Haining’s works are a challenge. The ordinariness of the materials used and the unresolved nature of their construction may provoke the aesthete to dismiss the work for its inability to provide instant gratification. Indeed, the work is disorienting: the audience is deprived of a sense of focal point or linear narrative. Furthermore, I dare say that the work is entirely vacant of sentiment. However, in extricating his pieces from these typical points of artistic reference, Haining has developed a work that explores the potential of form and space to challenge basic ideas regarding the finality of the art object.
Lastly, we encounter Luke McMaster’s work, An Unstable Living Arrangement. McMaster’s four sculptures exploit familiar forms and materials (MDF, acrylic, laminated pine, chrome knobs and stainless steel table legs), to create objects that invoke domestic utility, while compromising their functionality. Describing this work as a “monument to middle class civility”, the sleek colours and construction of these objects articulate the artist’s concern with the fetishisation of banal structures like drawers, bookshelves and bench-tops, as they serve as cultural and socio-economic signifiers. Besides this, there is also an Escher-like quality to the work, as the viewer finds their expectations of form and functionality undermined by structural impossibilities, chutes leading to nowhere and inoperable drawers or doors. The artist’s skill in mediating our aesthetic and functional expectations enables this intriguing and surreal experience of the work.
Having seen Firstdraft’s show, it is fascinating to reflect upon the manner in which all these artists convey an interest in the ambiguous territory in-between extremes, whether it be in regard to the serious and silly, the horrific and beautiful, becoming and destruction, or functionality and aestheticism. Admittedly however, the glaring distinctions of their chosen media, aesthetics and process mean that the resonances between these works in the space are only perceived obliquely. For the visitor this produces an overall effect of discontinuity or fragmentation that reflects the particular service that Artist Run Initiatives provide their visiting public: a glimpse into a diverse and discordant world of emerging art practices.
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