The solo exhibition, Renee Kire: Twist and Turn, at Rockhampton Museum of Art (RMOA) offers a new spin on feminist art in this, arguably, post-gender era.
The installation is positioned adjacent to artworks by some of the finest women artists this country has produced, featuring Australian matriarchs of many disciplines, including: photographer Tracey Moffatt, printmaker Judy Watson and ceramicist Gwyn Hanssen Pigott. A deficit of minimalist sculptures by women may be a predicament shared among many institutions.
The landmark Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors exhibition, staged at the Jewish Museum of New York in 1966, virtually defined the genre, but featured few women. A young Judy Chicago was one of them; however, she seemed to abandon minimalist sculpture after making her sizeable painted wooden installation, Rainbow Pickett, the same year.
Kire is an emerging artist who has consistently employed a not-dissimilar scale and aesthetic for the past two years. For this exhibition at least, she has also engaged a palette of soft pastel hues. Kire, however, presents a positive foray into the domestic. In contrast to Chicago’s brace-like vectors, Kire’s playful curves invite interaction.
To create a curved prism requires comparatively higher skills in woodworking. Apart from some computer numerical control (CNC) cutting, Kire painstakingly fashions the forms in her East Brisbane studio. The bends are singular in direction and plane; however, she has twisted aspects of the composition across an additional axis, by aligning consecutive sections at right angles. The subsequent squiggle-like constructions could transport a viewer back to their childhood. In these memories, things may appear bigger, yet somehow simpler.
A curious aspect of Twist and Turn is how the components are composited within a stainless steel and glass vitrine. Elements seem to float. The overall effect could remind an art connoisseur of seamlessly wall-mounted objects by Donald Judd or ‘cool’ paintings by Wassily Kandinsky.
In many of Kire’s exhibitions, viewers are literally immersed in a minimalist landscape of her making. In this instance, her sculptures are encased in a glass box, but both reflect and enhance the architecture. Arches feature prominently in both Kire’s artwork and the late Victorian and Edwardian era buildings in the surrounding streets. The gentler curves could be said to echo the aesthetics of the more recent Art Deco additions to this urban vista.
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A viewer needs to invest time to contemplate the consummate craftsmanship and complex cultural references represented by this deceptively simple set of sculptures.
Through Twist and Turn, Kire has effectively embraced the physical constraints of a vitrine, conveyed a curatorial focus of the RMOA collection – and addressed an unspoken caveat of the Western art canon.
Renee Kire: Twist and Turn will be exhibited at Rockhampton Museum of Art until 16 February 2025.
