MU Student Union Online

Jade Plitz, Hayley Scilini, Erin Carew, Amanda Airs, Raphael Buttonshaw, Jordan Hoffman, Sheree Hardcastle, Jean-Jacques Lale-Demoz and Bettina Garnier
8–18 September

The artists in this exhibition intend to explore through extended painting practices, certain relationships with time, space and the gallery. Issues of location, pop, colour abstraction and a dissolve of formal and historical relationships in art will be explored.

Ways to Swing a Cat by Grace Longato

Ways to Swing a Cat at the George Paton Gallery until 18th September, is a collaborative installation by students from RMIT’s painting department. Referencing aspects of Pop and Colour Abstraction, the artists explore the historical relationship between art object and the gallery, as well as challenging the audience in how they interact with the space.

On entering the gallery, one is drawn towards a stream of coloured rubber gloves spilling out from the far side of the gallery wall. The gloves set the scene for the show, directing us to meander through an eclectic array of recontextualised industrial materials and domestic objects. Creating a sea of colour and movement, these everyday retro ‘treasures’ such as mirrors, fans, lamps, hessian, wool and nylon, as well as the inclusion of conventionally painted abstract works, challenge the conventional ‘white cube’s perspective of exhibiting so called “high art” forms. In addition, the mass produced objects are also reminiscent of various Pop art concepts and style, in that one becomes amazed at the type and amount of goods discarded by our consumer society, and the ingenuity of the artists in mirroring this back to us.

However, through the interplay of positive and negative spaces as well as the abstract works’ shapes, colours, textures and patterns, components of the overall installation interact with one another to what is ultimately an exploration into contemporary interests of sculptural and spatial relationships. Space is important within the work as further evident in the video projection of the gallery located at the far end of the room. In trying to piece together what is shown in the footage of the galley empty at night to the real space around us, attention to small details are drawn, in particular the deliberate omission of the walls in the video and the rejection of them within the actual installation itself. In moving their work from the walls to the floor, the artists upset the “geometric path” of a typical viewing experience challenging the usual methods of orientation. This challenge is further enforced when one exits the exhibition, having to bypass the pin-hole camera with its single perspective viewing frame covered as it faces onto the main gallery space.

Ways to Swing a Cat is an exhibition that shows emerging artists reveling in the confined physical space of the gallery’s four walls. In exploring and upsetting conventional ways of making and viewing art, the artists attempt to liberate us from conformity, challenging us to become active participants in forming subjective views within the gallery environment.