Gendered space underpinned early 19th century views in the Western world with the belief that the ‘masculine sphere’ was one of public life, as opposed to the private feminine world of home and family. In the late 1960s, feminist art production began to expand on themes that contained imagery that dealt with the female body, personal experience, and in particular, challenging the traditional ideas of domesticity. The motifs that continued to proliferate in art that deal with the confines of the home usually depict a compendium of familiar and homely items from iron bedsteads, crockery, heavy floral furnishings, pianos, hats to mantelpiece bric-a-brac.
Curators and artists Sabrina Baker and Anja Loughhead seek to shift this perception in their exhibition Habitual Ritual with work by ten contemporary artists, Grace Blake, Kirsten Farrell, Shaun Hayes, Reuben Ingall, Patrick Lamour, Alycia Moffat, Al Munro, Eadie Newman, Leena Riethmuller and Kai Wasikowski who offer their own perspectives on our dwelling spaces and the representations of private performances within the home.
Baker and Loughhead have selected pieces that broaden the possibilities of what the everyday can offer us within the confines of the gallery. On opening night, Sydney-based experimental sound artist, Reuben Ingall, will re-stage Drone ritual (2014), a performance where Ingall kneels on the floor with a microwave, heating up a Four’n Twenty meat pie. Ingall attaches contact microphones to the exterior of the microwave picking up the ambient hum. Once the timer goes off, the beeping rings out and the pie is ready to be devoured. Ingell’s snack transcends into absurdity.
These notions of the everyday continue to be altered in Kai Wasikowski’s large-scale photographs that illustrate sections of foliage. These renderings are constructed through a process of lenticular printing, creating both the illusion of depth as well as movement. When you move, it moves with you. Although these photographs are optically unstable, Wasikowski’s subject matter of commonplace garden greenery is intentionally ambiguous; allowing the viewer to imagine any given place to be immersed in the sprawling limbs of flora. The result positions us somewhere in-between real and rendered space, these highly synthetic details of flora present the idea of nature as an inherently subjective and constructed experience.
Patrick Lamour’s intricate paintings of random household items are a refreshing departure from the usual portrayals of a domestic space. Pink shoe scissor knife pills (2016), for example, pictures a pink Croc, BIC cigarette lighter, a pair of kitchen scissors; a condom, Stanley knives and a used packet of Oxycontin are embedded within a colour background. Lamour’s selection of items float; the elements of the mundane are elevated to a heightened status of the painted canvas.
Loughead and Baker showcase a diverse mix of artists and ideas exploring the means in which the household environment infiltrates practice. This exhibition opens us up to the possibility that our own dwelling spaces can be a site for art-making and the existing tropes of the home can for a moment, be sidelined.
Chelsea Hopper is the current ‘Critic-in-Residence’ at ANCA.
ANCA Gallery
9 to 27 November, 2016
Australian Capital Territory
Patrick Lamour, Concentric bags, 2016, oil on linen
Kai Wasikowski, Breathing data, 2016, pure pigment on archival paper, acrylic lenticular lens, 165 x 118cm
Courtesy the artists and ANCA Gallery, Australian Capital Territory
