Sitting in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Collingwood, art gallery Off The Kerb is a wonderful anomaly – founder, owner and curator Shini Pararajasingham seems to consistently manage to attract high-quality artists and keep the art’s prices affordable (having these two together is rare). If you’d like proof, look no further than this exhibition.
The art of Glen Downey, wrapped around the walls of the front room, may not be original in concept, but it makes up for that in technique, visual imagination and the sheer fun that the artist is clearly having. Each of his paintings is a portrait of a person’s bust, with their face transformed into a landscape of objects, flora or fauna.
A Little Birdhouse in Your Soul has Downey’s subject turned into a ball of feeding rosellas; Animalias converts them into a nest of huddling possums and a very appropriately placed bearded dragon; ’97 ‘Til Infinity substitutes them with a bust filled with retro technology like TDK computer disks, game console handsets and a non-touchscreen phone.
Each of Downey’s paintings is a visual banquet, every one a small technical marvel unto itself, as they play three-dimensional Tetris with the organic or inorganic, the mobile or the sessile. Also, all his paintings have a QR code beneath them, where you can see a time-lapse video of that painting’s creation. A nice touch.
Kate Pullen’s work fills the next room, with clean lines and simple colours giving a good contrast to Downey’s paintings. Pullen’s work was inspired by her ‘mental health journey’ involving ‘grounding –pausing to engage with our senses’. They are visually similar to glass mosaics, the kinds used in decorative windows, yet her medium is acrylic and plywood. Wattles, banksias and lavender are among her subjects, each with an individual frame design that shows an excellent eye for composition.
Upstairs are the works of Dan Go and Nyssa Braid. Go and Braid’s work (all the works are credited to both artists), revisit “the stories, toys and shared childhood experiences that shaped our early worldview” and how those affect us as adults. Their work is predominantly ceramic, in a variety of forms. One nine-piece work (is that an enneaptych or just a just a polyptych?) tells a simple narrative, each circular work being a guess of what’s going to be for dinner. The work オレオレ (Ore ore/ It’s me, It’s me) is a concertina-shaped collection of children’s drawings, bookended by a ceramic cover, which intrigues with its explosions of colour inside, and its stony grey ceramic outside.
The gallery’s last room, overlooking the Tote hotel, lets you into the splendidly quirky mind of Isabella Hayes. Her works look like paintings, but they’re actually plasticine. The pictures she plasticines (is plasticines a verb? It is now) discuss how “our connections to the modern world have distanced us from our true nature, rendering us ghosts – fantasma – in our own worlds”.
She discusses this topic by combining nature and technology (for instance Vline Snake), anthropomorphism (The Mirror), fourth wall breaking (A Peak Behind the Scenes) and surrealism (The Possums). What combines them is not only a cohesively individual style, but also the feeling that every piece has a definite message, moral or meaning, and it’s your job to figure out what that is – whether it’s the artist’s message, moral or meaning or your own.
Read: Exhibition review: Honey Long and Prue Stent: Body Heat, Arc One Gallery
As a case in point, on opening night, this reviewer overheard a woman leaving Hayes’ room, saying “when I saw that picture, I saw my childhood, my whole f**king childhood”. Which one she saw is a mystery, but evidently a powerful one.
All in all, another collection of quality artistic offerings from Off The Kerb.
Glen Downey: You Can Be…ANYTHING!
Isabella Hayes: Fantasma
Kae Pullen: Grounding
Dan Go & Nyssa Braid: Daruma (達磨)
Off The Kerb gallery & studios
The joint exhibition will run until 28 November 2024.
