Artwork expo expresses ever-changing Australia

By Amir Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): The exhibitions held in conjunction with Australia Today Indonesia '94 at the National Museum question the Australian artists' perception of their own country, and at the same time challenge the world's popular perception of Australia.

Displayed in different sections of the museum in Central Jakarta, works included in "Family", "Interiors", and "Location" express the artists' views of their nation as not a fixed entity, but rather as a transitory and ever-changing Australia.

In Family, seven craftpersons attempt "to reflect their personal view of the place of the family in Australian society" in art installations. Evidently, even the institution of the family as well as the artists' perceptions of it reflects changes in Australian society.

Joanne Crawford, for example, recreates functional spaces of the Australian home using objects such as scrap metal, plastic bread wrappers, newspapers, boxes, ceramics, glass and botanical material. The kitchen sink is made of scrap metal and wire, and it is equipped with old forks, knives, and tin cups. To evoke the feeling of comfort, the living room uses softer materials. Red, yellow, and orange dried leafs, interspersed within hand-made paper shape form a lounge chair.

Crawford's work is not merely intended to portray an idyllic impression of home. While the colorful leafs she uses have come to symbolize beauty, ironically the brilliant colors are a product of decomposition; the beauty of the dried leafs are remnants of life. Through the use of recycled and perishable materials she also expresses the notion of time affecting change and decay, perhaps even the change and decay of the Australian home.

Pierre Cavalan's installation entitled Family Life in 12 Tableaux presents the mantelpiece as the symbolic center of the home, an image derived from the British home. Above the fireplace, he places a television screen to express the notion of communication. An immigrant from France, the artist uses the television as a means of presenting a personal narrative; it was meant to show videos that his family has sent to him from France as a way of communicating and keeping up with current events.

Above it, Cavalan places photographs, postcards and other paraphernalia that evoke his memories of France. Whimsically, he includes a French cheese wrapper, the brand name of which he can relate to very well: Le Bon Kangourou.

Mantelpiece

Flanking the mantelpiece are framed collage panels consisting of small objects. While the frames refer to the trade of the artist's father as a picture framer, the collages reflect his own talents as a jeweler. His personal statements continue left of the mantelpiece.

Images of Cavalan's statements of universal concepts are displayed to the right of the mantelpiece. Four lights of a window show images of the rites of passage: birth, childhood, life and death. While birth, life and death are portrayed as being on the same layer beyond the window, the light representing childhood extends beyond the layer. A mini-installation consisting of dolls and other toys is placed behind this light. It is constructed using mirrors and other visual aids, allowing viewers to look well beyond this window light. It is the artist's "window of reality."

On one hand Cavalan's installation represents his perception of the image of an Anglo-Saxon Australian home, while on the other, his use of this domestic artifact suggests the creation of a layer of his French ethnicity. The Australian home is changing.

In Catherine Truman's composition, nine red carved wooden squares are arranged to form a larger square. The red of the square reflects the blood bond of the family.

Crafted out of wood and painted, two fish are placed between three boats in a line next to the composition of squares. The fish portray the flesh of the family, while the boats remind us that the majority of Australia's population is comprised of migrants from all over the world. The variety of experiences people go through during the migration are represented through the different shapes of the vessels.

Truman's piece talks about change in many different ways. Each of the red squares implies the fragments of a continuum of emotional currents which flow through time within the family. It also talks about the change that happens in a process of migration, acculturation and enculturation, while at the same time about an ever-changing Australia.

Nature

In the second exhibition, Interiors, Andrew Parker's ceramics portray Garden of Eden scenes as his retreat from the arid environment of Uralla, New South Wales, where he resides. Hope for rainfall is symbolized by a fountain. The pieces mainly refer to the natural environment, using the dolphin to represent the element of nature.

The artist also has fun with some visual puns in his work. Interested in permaculture, he learns that you do not need to dig when you have a hen. So, he portrays a hen with a spade in its beak, to suggest that "the hen is mightier than the spade", referring to the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword."

The image of a daisy is used as an optimistic symbol of faith. Daisies, which grow even in the cracks of concrete in winter, represent a faith that even in this bleak economic recession, there is hope for a better tomorrow. Parker's symbolic language expresses his hope for a more comfortable Uralla and a better Australia.

Photography

All works in Location, a photography exhibition, explore Australia as through an extensive exploration of the medium of photography. Robyn Stacey's All the Sounds of Fear distances herself from the depiction of an anonymous, generic city, which she creates using images from popular culture magazines and television.

Never "in situ", she is alienated from the fictional city which she created herself. To further alienate herself, the image is recreated using computers, removing traces of human involvement. She presents the piece under the smooth sheen of laminated Perspex, alienating viewer from the artwork.

Her strip format rendered in the colors she uses, derived from the reds, greens, and blues of the television screen takes the viewer toward cyber-reality. Although it is not specifically about a city in Australia, the increasing alienation that people experience as a result of living in the city would inevitably effect Australia as well.

Colonialism is a predominant theme in the show. Seven hinged photo-cabinets by Kevin Todd introduce various layers of the Australian state of Tasmania's 'history'. The exploration, colonization, and development of the state is depicted using two formats. Gelatin silver prints of aerial photographs and literal maps embellish the face of the cabinets, literally establishing a geographical framework of the state's historical development. Windows cut at the center of the face of the cabinet display well-known drawings, prints, photographs and other graphic images, printed on duplicating film, to portray the historical events.

Ever-changing

As the development of the state is ever-changing, its history is virtually impossible to grasp as a fixed entity. Each panel manages only to capture a fragment of historical time.

Home and Away by Ian North juxtaposes two views, an idyllic English landscape and Frank Hurley's image of an Antarctic iceberg. One is an image of the cultivated and the other of the wild, the frontier. Colors are then painted over the photographs, creating an awkward composition. North claims that the application of the paints, which link the two images of disparate parts of the world, parallel colonialism, which also attempts to arbitrarily link two different entities, to create an awkward symbiosis.

Using historical images which are not of his own, North distances himself from the ownership of the photographic statement as well as the issue of photography as a colonialist means of ownership. What is his is merely the comment he creates by using the paint to link the two images. Here, although photography is used, it is not the artist's photographic work that is the main element of the painting. North has claimed authorship by an act of altering photographic images. Here, it is not the subject matter that is changing. Rather, the altered image can reflect changing Australian perspectives.

The three exhibits at the National Museum reflect both the reality as well as the artists' perspectives of an ever-changing Australia. What is Australia anyway? "That would be hard to pinpoint, wouldn't it?" reacted Andrew Parker.