Play - Punctuated Into An Exclamation Mark

Punctuated Into An Exclamation Mark

A review of Michelle Le Dain, PLAY, at Factory 49

Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play.

Johannes Itten

To play is to enter a realm of wonder and spontaneous activity, of open-ended thinking, of chance and of discovery. It is to question, to turn upside-down, to surprise – and it is uninhibitedly joyous. Yet to play is also to engage with the objects in play, to work within a structure and to bounce against the rules - as in playing a game or improvising musically For visual artist Michelle Le Dain to play as an artist is a mode of practice by which her installations enter, engage with and yes, absolutely have fun with architectonic space

For some time Le Dain has been working with and developing a signature vocabulary of elemental geometric forms, bright colours, taped lines and placement of other assemblages. These arise out of her research interest in theories of play (as advanced by Froebel and the kindergarten movement) and their considerable influence on the genesis of abstract art in the early 20th century. When these formal elements enter a space as raw materials for installation, they seem to skip along the floor, walls, ceiling, seeking out hidden nooks and cavorting with expected notions of form and function. Playfully probing, discovering and exclaiming, Play raises some very interesting questions about our expectations and perceptions of built spaces, and in particular white spaces for the display of art.

Michelle Le Dain, Upside down inside out, 2016 (detail) Image: Annelies Jahn

As an installation within this factory-turned-gallery space Play picks up on its many narratives as a functional interior space. Tripping along a seam in the concrete floor, small wooden blocks tap out a rhythm of alternating colour and form. Picking up the melody, a striped line ascends the white wall, almost but not quite to the top, before meandering via a deviation in blue to an arrow-signalled descent, only to ascend again. A faded yellow parking line is punctuated into an exclamation mark. Over to the side, another up / down movement is articulated by horizontal and vertical notes of colour placed on a stairway. These lead in to the percussive cadence of a work, appropriately named “Xylophone”. On closer inspection, these ‘notes’ are actually painted stretcher bars, suggesting a painting undone, dismantled and capable of being fitted together again, like any tower of blocks.

Michelle Le Dain, “Play” 2016, Installation at Factory 49 Image: Annelies Jahn

Michelle Le Dain, Play, 2016, (details) Installation at Factory 49 Images: Annelies Jahn

From factory space to gallery space, the play is now with gallery conventions of display and sale. Giant red dots sit beside works, humorously playing with the tradition of announcing a sale. In this context, plinths become oversized toy blocks. Paintings, stacked, stripped and deconstructed, are everywhere except hanging on the walls as pictures to look at. Framing, like pointing, is used to focus on often quirky details of wall or floor. Used as expressive punctuation within a piece of music, other features of the Factory 49 space are accented. Here, in hot pink: a door, over there in green: a gallery wall ends. In a corner, big buttons seem to be climbing up and over the white wall, looking over the boundary between the site’s industrial past and its almost-white-cube present.

The effect of Play is akin to recalling the strains of a rhyme you knew as a child, a ditty you chanted, a haunting refrain, parts of a song. You might go to see art, but you are nudged to think quite a bit more about how and why It’s a little unsettling. Play has transformed the known space and the expected conventions into a joyous, whimsical interlude with an underlying seriousness of purpose in showing the work that art is.

Play at Factory 49 between 24 November – 3 December, 2016 Factory 49 is open 1-6pm Thursday to Friday. 49 Shepherd Street, Marrickville.

Lisa Sharp

(Images by Annelies Jahn)

November 2016

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Lisa Sharp is a Malaysian-born Australian artist, writer and curator currently living and working in Sydney. Following an earlier career as a lawyer, she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the National Art School. Lisa likes to write about art and artists and her blog is at www.lisa-sharp.tumblr.com

This review was also published online in the Rochford Street Review, November 2016 rochfordstreetreview.com