In this series of self-portraits I photographed myself looking into the mirror at photographs from my family album of me as a very young baby, a two year old, a pre-pubescent girl and as a young woman. This photographs from my family album reveals physical changes that I have undergone throughout my life. My facial expressions are in response to looking at the photographs of me when I was younger...I tried to connect with the person I was when each of the earlier photographs was taken. I felt a gap, a void between me and each fragile self. I could not reach this former self who is still a part of me.

Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Like Art Magazine 16 Spring 2001 P69.
Review of Blindspot
Curated by Lisa Byrne
Canberra Contemporary Art Space 4 August - 1 September 2001

Automatically, a blind spot is the light-insensitive point on the retina where it meets the optic nerve. Most people, like me, tend to use the word more figuratively. Recently in conversation a friend of mine used the term to describe a particular point of departure with an otherwise good and long-standing friend - a 'blind spot' in their friendship. I'm probably most aware of blind spots in moments of shock when, for example, the horn of another vehicle reminds me that I do need to check beyond my field of vision offered by the rear vision of my Datsun 120Y.

Notions of blind spots in the work of six artists - Peta Clancy, Lindsay Dunbar, Ellis Hutch, Emma Jean, Shannon Sutherland and Alison Weaver - at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in an exhibition curated by Lisa Byrne. The show reminded me that, although usually physically threatening, looking at art often requires a metaphorical ‘head check’ involving an engagement with complex, contradictory or ambiguous states. The nature of these visual and mental challenges seems something of a Zeitgeist for young Australian artists. Gail Hasting, curator of the Primavera exhibition about to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, has described the theme of this year’s show paradoxically as ‘the blind spots we sometimes see’. It’s a lofty, ambitious focus for an exhibition in any city. I mean how do you visually communicate something that is by definition invisible of indescribable, let alone make it clear and understood? In her catalogue essay Lisa Byrne acknowledges that ‘it would seem bold to attempt a description of such objects, objects that arguably do not exist.’ Her solution, and the strength and ultimate strength of the Canberra exhibition, lies in allowing the works to speak for themselves.

Alison Weaver’s Gap Filling is a video installation that follows a trail of tar laid down by a bitumen gap filler. I enjoyed the early reference to the road since I mostly think about blind spots in the car. In the video the arm of the gap filler moves sporadically, spilling out a molten glistening line, sometimes following cracks in the road, sometimes moving more randomly. The work poses questions about the nature of making art and then making sense of what you see. Is Weaver responsible for laying down the tar or the composition of the drawing on the road? Or is the basis of her work the video documentation of these processes? It’s an absorbing piece. I watched the growth of the line, my eye looking for a pattern, trying to make sense of the repetition of the abstract squiggles. But the video contains no narrative, nor does it reveal a final visual perspective of the drawing process.

Can a photograph, indeed a portrait of any kind, bear any fundamental or lasting truth about its subjects? In her series of photographs, She looked back but she could not see clearly, Peta Clancy is shown holding a series of photographs of herself, from early childhood to adulthood. It reminded me of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, ‘looking for the truth of the face I had loved’ as he searches for a photograph of his deceased mother that is justesse. Barthes locates one such photograph but never reproduces this treasured ‘Winter Garden Photograph’ in the book: he realises that the ‘truth’ of the photograph is particular to him. Similarly, although Clancy presents a smaller, more intimate sequence of photographs, the nature or identity of the subject – one can only assume both series are of Clancy – is inaccessible to us. We can do little more than recognise a similarity in, say, the shape of the eyebrows, the nose, of a certain curve of the mouth.

The blind spots surrounding Lindsay Dunbar’s screen prints and the photographs of Shannon Sutherland deal very directly with visual perception. In Scape, Dunbar constructs a series of images by repeatedly printing a detailed black and white matrix representing a segment of a mass gathering or crowd scene. The matrix is dense, so in order to make out any recognisable forms one must move away from the works’ haze of light and dark pixels. The emerging landscapes recall the visual affects as achieved in Roy Lichtenstein’s re-working of Monet’s Cathedral paintings. In another of Dunbar’s prints I was reminded of the experience of seeing faces and other objects in clouds. Shannon Sutherland’s photographs reverse this process by obscuring already existing images until they are unrecognisable abstract forms.

The works of Ellis Hutch and Emma Jean are object-based sculptural installations that refer to a lost past and the former uses of objects. Ellis Hutch’s Smother is difficult but intriguing. The piece is like one of those old quilts your grandparents had, made up of rectangular lozenges stuffed with soft filling covered in a silky fabric. Hutch’s creation obviously didn’t belong to anyone’s grandparents; it was made for the exhibition. Yet it is full of secret associations in its irregular markings, where the tension of pulled threads and popping-out stuffing suggest use and age. Hooked to the wall the quilt falls cocoon-like, folding in on itself, creating dark caves, concealing shape and utility. Emma Jean fixes a series of cassettes to the wall and pulled out the audio-tape cleverly pinning the lengths at intervals to make shapes; another play on ‘drawing’ in the exhibition. Audio-tapes are an increasingly defunct technology but they still contain information. A tape can also act like a personal time capsule of archive reminding us of our musical tastes and moods. Jean irreverently plays with the sensitive film on which sound is recorded; by spreading it across the wall she subverts it function and transforms audio into visual.

Blind Spot is an elegant and successful exhibition. Subtleties and questions emerge from the individual works and resonate within the curator’s selection without being forced. Lisa Byrne’s discussion of the artists in her catalogue essay is equally as effortless, though I found the theoretical framework she proposes hard going and less convincing. Stephen Zagala sums up the show in his lucid and satisfying contribution to the catalogue, suggesting that ‘the works in this exhibition tend to show us the effects of blind spots rather than providing pictures of the blind spots themselves.’ Magda Keaney