EyeContact

An Other Peryer

The New Objectivity of the 1920s made explicit what the Realism project of the mid-nineteenth century only hinted at: that, visually, appearances were the lodestar to deciding what's what, not any belief about what might constitute substance. It was a switch that turned photography on. This didn't, though, eliminate the human quest to fathom those larger questions as to what appearances may mean. But a Rubicon of sensibility had been crossed and the only way was forward.

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An Artwork that Multiplies

In 1962 in London Barrie Bates renamed himself as Billy Apple and trained his body to only respond to that name. Products of his body such as secretions in tissue paper also became artworks, as did bodily actions like cleaning windows or hoovering. Now, years later, and after becoming a registered trademark, he is enlisting advanced scientific research to ensure cells taken from his blood can reproduce indefinitely, in order that replicas of himself might be created long after his death.

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Lochore Paintings

The oddity of mixing shadows and refraction together also suggests something else that regularly occurs in photographic images because of properties within the camera lens: chromatic aberration. Such haloes hint that photographic reproduction as subject matter is just as important to this artist - if not more - as seeing fuzzy shadows on walls directly.

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Talking Todd-lish: Mystery and Manners in the Art of Yvonne Todd

Different registers collide. That's all part of the Todd syntax. She juxtaposes words that normally don't get outings together; previous exhibitions include Goat Sluice and Iris Paste. Over time Todd has formed her own arresting and dubious language: from the faux-pharmacetical authority of Frottex and Drextel to the mawkish obscurity of Mousel and Mulkie.

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Brett Graham Carving

Graham's use of dizzying visual velocity - you get vertigo when you focus on the fine detail - makes a lot of sense when you consider that these wall relief works are symbols for the terrible fast moving tsunamis that did catastrophic damage in Samoa, Chile and Japan. The bodily sensation these sculptures elicit is a variety of alarm, a small, gently churning panic at the confusion caused by the receding lines.

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Brincat in Sydney

'To shoot from the hip' is to make a rash decision, without thought for the consequences; it is fast-paced yet also within stride. It is here we may think about those four words as a decision-making structure more instinctual than reckless, for it is that space between trusting one's gut and not thinking at all - a conflicting moment where time may be equal but the journey is not - where we find the potency of Brincat's work.

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Verbal and Peripatetic Rambling

In the large square room at Artspace Taniguchi has made hollow box shaped sculptures out of thin layers of hardened cement (with black oxide mixed in) applied to banana boxes and reinforced with hessian. The thin corrugated cardboard has later been peeled off and the coarse rectangular planes joined up. There is a strange wit about these forms because they are delicate and brittle, not qualities normally ascribed to concrete.

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Treating Space with Photography

Beck draws with light in situ in the gallery as installation, pulling his ideas into a meeting of photography, painting and sculpture that explores visual perception and comprehension. This cross media exploration is interesting. The works have a sculptural and painterly base as much as a photographic one, but also consider their physical positioning in relationship to the movement of light in a space.

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Volume Two from Artspace

The long interviews with Frankovich and Maw show two very different personalities and are very interesting when you compare what they say with what you see in their work. Maw is extremely entertaining when describing her competitive instincts towards Francis Upritchard, and why she persuaded her to sit for the portrait she exhibited in Artspace: part fangirl; part touching the hem of her garment; part jealousy.

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Glancing at the History of Digital Art

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith's objects, sperm whale tooth, adze, teapot, poi, Tapa beater, fish hook and others are life size forms built up from fine layers of glue laid down in small delicate strips during the process of manufacture. They present themselves as highly tactile yet prohibit touch because of their strange translucent ghostly nature.

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