Presented by RiAus
@ The Science Exchange – Future Space Gallery
MONDAY 5th March (until March 16)
A purple light shines from the basement of the RiAus building. I step down the ornate wooden staircase, the stairs creaking under my feet, and move into a short tunnel swathed in a neon glow. I stare at the floor, then at the walls, then the ceiling, trying to make sense of the pattern that envelops me. When I feel I’ve worked it out, grabbed hold of some repetition, decoded the sequence, my eye skips to another group of geometric shapes and I feel my certainty collapsing.
The work is Opening, 2012, by Melbourne-based, Adelaide-born artist Sam Songailo, and according to the booklet I hold in my hand, apparently what I’m experiencing is the mind’s natural inclination to examine patterns for points of difference, to decipher them. Somewhat reminiscent of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s light-based works, the piece acts as a useful entry point, both literal and figurative, into Art, Pattern, and Complexity, curated by Margot Osborne.
As Osborne notes in her illuminating introduction to the exhibition, “A survey of contemporary artists influenced by scientific philosophies of pattern and complexity is a rich field indeed and beyond the modest scope of this exhibition”. Despite both the cautious warning of this statement and the pokey size of the exhibition space, Art, Pattern, and Complexity manages, for the most part, to satisfy both the mind and the eye, cleverly raising questions about the interplay between art and science, and the future of artistic practice in a technological age.
Rather than cataloguing work that crosses the art/science divide, Osborne’s aim is to introduce, “the fields of biology, the cross-disciplinary thinking of complexity theory and the fledgling scientific study of ‘neuro-aesthetics’,” highlighting the potential for science to shape the way art is created and experienced. Though expressions like ‘complexity theory’ and ‘neuro-aesthetics’ might usually have my inner Arts student running for the hills, Osborne has been careful to choose works that hint at their scientific influence rather than beating one over the head with a hardcover textbook.
Perhaps the best work in the exhibition is Natalie McLeod’s Membrane Layer, 2011, a digital textile print draped down the east wall of the FutureSpace Gallery. A selection from her Natural Produce series, the work uses monochrome micrographs of chicken eggshells to create a textile print of immense depth. As I try to make my way through the exhibition, I find myself gazing at the fabric, my eye traversing the seemingly endless peaks and troughs of the fibrous image. In addition to being visually arresting, through its subject the work questions our conceptions of both waste and recycling. By utilizing eggshells, a substance usually cast by humans into the rubbish or the compost, McLeod questions our unthinking categorisation of waste. And by ‘recycling’ this product for creative, rather than utilitarian, ends, she complicates ideas about sustainability and re-use.
Similarly striking is Caroline Durré’s wall painting, Armed Space with ornament, 2012. By playing with pattern, perspective and shadow, Durré has constructed a piece that as I stand before it, seems to bloom out from the wall.
As I make my way around I pause and sit before a TV screen. On it, a series of shapes move slowly, overlapping one another, gradually changing colour. The work is Paul Brown’s Dragon, 2012, and though it is interesting, meditative, even, it really captivates my interest when I discover that the work develops through ‘Cellular Automata’. As Brown explains, “These are simple [computational] systems that can propagate themselves over time and display complex behaviour”. In other words, once programmed the work modifies itself, changing its appearance through its own internal processes. As I stare at the image I wonder what the repercussions of this approach are for the position of the artist; perhaps this is art as ‘intelligent design’ rather than creationism.
Though most of the pieces manage to be interesting on both aesthetic and theory-based levels, as is often the case with contemporary art, some fall foul of the idea-over-execution trap. Jon McCormack’s generative software programs explore similar territory to Paul Brown’s work, but do so in a way that, for me, fails to excite the eye. Similarly, Tracy Cornish’s Plotting Glitches, 2011-12, though undoubtedly governed by software I could never hope to understand, comes off looking like a Windows 98 screensaver.
But these are minor hiccups. As I stare at Whoosh, 2011, by Kerrie Poliness, or stab my finger at MESNE Design Studio’s Pricking 1.2, 2012, an interactive screen that creates lace patterns, or stop again before McLeod’s Membrane Layer, I find that despite the tiny size of the exhibition space, the relatively small number of works in it, I’m somewhere new, lost in the mutterings of my excited mind.
