Shadow Palette exhibition essay Alex Karaconji / Shannon Smith / Laura Sutton / Lisa Pang / Simon W heeldon Exhibition at Stacks Projects 5 – 22 M arch 2020 In recent times and as we prepared for this exhibition, this city was a smokescape. With the world turned ashen and drained of colour, the usually unremarkable aspects of everyday life became charged. Living in the thickness of an unnatural natural event was an intense sensate experience. Distanced just enough from the immediate risk of bushfire, we were nonetheless shrouded in its effects and empathetic. General conversations tended towards overt politicisation and polarisation of views. It was as if the acute bodily physicality of being in such times, those greyed days of monochrome, made us aware of forms and values more keenly. Within the prescient burntsmelling haze, paradoxically, some things were clearer than ever. As a group of artists working to a curation by Shannon Smith, we had similarly subdued parameters within which to make works for this specific space. For a start, colour was abandoned in favour of other form-finding strategies. Tone, texture, weight. Materials and materiality. Structure, technique, content. These attributes seemed to increase in significance. Another aim, to dramatize the relationship between our works and their exhibition environment, had us picturing the gallery space in our minds as we worked: that grey-green and white cube on an inner city street.
Shadow Palette exhibition installed at Stacks Projects
What is it that happens to visual experience when colour fades, and drama enters? The works of Shadow Palette suggest that perhaps, it is like wandering through a city late at night, close to a dream. In such a state, one observes the city’s details at a remove, but in shattering detail, and occasionally embellished.
Alex Karaconji
Karaconji’s Night Works animates the relentless urban spectacle of progress - construction of a controversial tramway under cover of darkness. Projected wide and overlapping the back wall the repetition of drawn marks and actions set up an inexorable audio-visual rhythm. Then, something moves in the corner of sight. Attention is gently drawn to Sutton’s transparent geometric forms, which beckon, capture and distil visual tableaux within. Occupied, suspended on the periphery of the gallery space alternately engages the street and gallery spaces as shaped lenses for gazing. There, that stone on the wall tempts touch. Smith’s Interstate presents a façade, alternately carved, stippled, smoothed and angled, inviting light and shadow play. Rectilinear divisions across its solidity recall a map, a quilt, or an entire terrain. Also deliberately placing itself between surface and solid form, my work Swell sites itself in the comforting oddness of a small curve in a wall. A series of stitched linen samplers wrapped into gesso cocoons ‘paint’ the curve.
Laura Sutton
Shannon Smith
Lisa Pang
Simon Wheeldon
On the facing wall, the bleached grisaille calm Wheeldon’s painting Ancient Methods belies the straining depiction of a snowperson and plough horse, inexplicably wading in deep snow. And so, seen indistinctly, yet crisply, with the blanketing effect of colourlessness, small things and details seem somehow magnified, as if existing between the truths of memory, imagination and knowledge. So, day or night, if you take a moment to stand still on the public pavement, you may observe, isolated from the interior drama taking place within Stacks Projects. Framed for you like a box, spectate the diorama, lit by animated light, disturbed by softly moving windows and elaborated by gestures of touch and imagined motion.
Shadow Palette exhibition installed at Stacks Projects
Words: Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp) Images: Document Photography February / March 2020