MU Student Union Online

Matthew Greaves
25 August–4 September

Water suddenly boil
Water gradually boils
Water is suddenly boiling

Opening night: Wednesday 26 August, 5–7pm

an and

Review by Viona Fung

The exhibition ‘an and’ showcases the artwork of Fine Arts student Matthew Greaves who is currently third year student at the Victorian College of the Arts. As the exhibition title suggests, Greaves’ conceptually based artwork poses open ended questions, deliberately intended to obscure and play with the viewer’s concepts of space and time. Greaves describes his work as ‘genetic paradoxes’ that ‘bristle with error to colour a grip with the problematic’.

All of the artwork in this exhibition is untitled, adding further to the misty, undefined realm Greaves prefers to relegate his artwork.

His video work seems simply constructed, yet hints at deeper meanings beyond the apparent playfulness received from a first viewing. One example of such work is the 3 minute looped video, screened on a small television set positioned under a chair. The video shows two hands formed in the shape of a turtle. The thumbs rotate in a curious, beguiling fashion, flipping over to reveal the palms and eventually turning over again to slide away from the viewer. Is this mimicry of childhood, an allusion to sign language or a critique of our visual consumerist culture?

A strikingly lyrical construction is found in the ‘untitled’ work with slide projector and basketball. Two unlikely pairings create a nostalgic, surreal experience of time travel. This work presents an archival photograph projected onto a blank wall, showing an Egyptian pyramid partly obscured by a camel and his rider standing in the foreground. A basketball, placed in front of the wall, casts an immense circular shadow, interrupting the ancient scene with a post-modern plastic eclipse. The shadow of the basketball appears like a dark alien orb, akin to the mysterious black monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Greaves’ has described himself as ‘a kind of mediator for a thinker, for an idiot—I kick around in their dust’. This statement, like his artwork, curiously reveals and simultaneously obscures, the answers we seek to those open ended questions.

*Viona Fung is currently completing MA in Curatorship at the University
of Melbourne.*