Students of the Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing course at Swinburne University of Technology have completed reviews of the most recent major exhibition at Town Hall Gallery, ‘Seasonal Shifts’, as part of their classes on arts criticism. A selection of writings from the class can be found below.
‘Seasonal Shifts’ can be viewed on our Online exhibitions page.
Reviews
Seasonal Shifts is an exhibition on seasons and how they come together and shift. It features the works of Matt Arbuckle, Wona Bae, Charlie Lawler, Tamara Dean, Brian Robinson, Annika Romeyn, Hiromi Tango and James Tylor.
The exhibition depicts nature and how different people can interpret it. Strolling through the exhibition enlightened me to this idea, whether it be in a metaphorical or literal sense, or something based on what the future may hold or may be found in the past. It flashed memories of my past, a dead tree beside a river on a pebbled beach with a bridge nearby, while generating ideas of the future within my mind.
The pieces by James Tylor have a disconnected and surrealist view of nature, emphasised by having holes cut out of it. The piece ‘(Vanished Scenes) from an Untouched Landscape 8’ is a black and white image of the Australian countryside. In the bottom left quadrant is a void of black velvet cut into the image, obscuring what was once behind. The piece emphasises the obtrusive effects humanity has been having on nature.
Tylor’s work is dedicated primarily to their understanding of what is happening to the environment, largely by big corporations, and a wish to stop further impact. This important message is conveyed through their artwork in an esoteric manner.
On the other end of this spectrum is Brian Robinson, whose two exhibited pieces differ markedly. One is a warm animation, full of vibrant colours, highlighting those found in nature; the other a scheme of contrasting black and white depicting various objects, from plants and statues from history, to planets, spaceships, and sea life. They are other fun pieces, especially ‘Zugabal: The Winds and the Tides Set the Pace’, with its variety of pop culture references. This busy piece features a dense array of patterns, icons and pop culture references. It also utilises a variety of rounded lines in a grid-like fashion around a sun and moon, stretching across a galaxy before being obscured by a ring of plant life. Below that are many sea creatures, both in and out of a body of water spanning the bottom of the piece.
Robinson’s work has a more lighthearted feel than Tylor’s and focuses more on what is in nature and what has been borne from it.
Walking around the exhibition provided me with a sense of warmth, exposing hope for what the future may hold within the environment around us. However, there are pieces that inhibit a sense of impending danger through the actions humans have taken for resources. The impact of these pieces should be felt now, more than ever, and not just by me.
Seasonal Shifts as an exhibition shows how these artists interpret the meaning of shifting seasons. The exhibition evokes warm feelings and provokes wide thoughts about the environment, through the many artists’ stories.
The Seasonal Shifts exhibition was a double-edged sword, putting me face-to-face with the majesty of nature as it goes through its cycles and changes; but, also with the harsh reality that we have a delicate relationship with nature that in recent times has been highly abusive and caused irreversible destructive shifts within it. To engage with this exhibition is to taste a bittersweet reflection of life itself as you go from piece to piece, watching as they blossom and wither, nourish and harm.
I took my time slowly scanning my way across ‘Vice Versa’, a large fabric piece by Matt Arbuckle (a continuation/reciprocation of his previous piece ‘Recto-Verso’) that was pinned to the wall by assorted pieces of reclaimed wood. I was drawn in by its shifting colours and free-flowing patterns which were created incidentally through Arbuckle’s unique method of dying the fabric, using the texture of the ground itself to guide the pigments. It struck me as a sophisticated parallel to the timeless tie-dye method and provided a stunning result. The soft, colourful fabric appealed to me in such a way that I felt myself coveting it, wanting something like it in my own home – to surround myself with the comfort of free-flowing colour and nature within rooms that currently are largely plain and grayscale.
As the colours flow from green, through orange, to purple, back through orange, and finally return to green again; I was struck by a similarity to the natural cycle of plants as bushfire season blazes through them. It is a marvel how much of Australia’s endemic plant life (green and flourishing) functions in such a way that when a devastating orange blaze rips through them and turns them to deeper, charred colours like the purple, they do not perish entirely. With time and orange sunlight, they sprout again and grow back to their full green splendour and the cycle is complete. Despite being an inanimate object, the fabric elegantly relayed the tale of this fiery annual journey to me.
Meanwhile, ‘(Vanished Scenes) from an Untouched Landscape’, a series of pieces created by James Tylor, told a story about a different destructive fire: human colonial interests. A fire that has destroyed many precious things forever and isn’t as easily recovered from. Tylor’s pieces are simple black and white photographs of Australian landscapes, but they feel entirely ruined by the big chunks that have been taken out of them, leaving just a void of empty black velvet in the midst of nature.
Initially, I had assumed these holes to represent the greedy extraction of materials from nature for industry and profit with scarce regard for how this would impact the planet we live on. The series next to this one – also by Tylor – explored that very idea by covering large portions of some nature photographs of a water basin with covetous golden shapes. But in the case of ‘from an Untouched Landscape’, the chunks that had been removed actually represent “the removal of Aboriginal people’s presence from the landscape”, while “the voids left behind symbolise the loss of thousands of years of collective memory”.
I mentally kicked myself for forgetting to even consider this as a possible interpretation of the images. The cultural erasure was so thorough that even as somebody who considers himself fairly conscious of this matter, I still find it alarmingly easy to forget. Perhaps the striking visual representation of the erasure presented through this art may stick with me and stay more readily available at the front of my mind? Perhaps that’s what Tylor was hoping for when creating these pieces. If that is the case, in the week since I visited this exhibition, it has thus far worked.
The pieces of this exhibition, from the magnified images of lichen to the ever-growing collection of visitor-made flowers on the wall (where I learned that it is exceedingly tricky to craft a flower with only twine to bind it into shape), each tell a different story. It was a sobering experience to explore these themes of nature, our relationship with it, and how it changes; and I left the gallery with a newfound appreciation of nature, a renewed love of dynamic, striking patterns, and a harsh reminder of our impact on both the environment and ourselves.