Kate Shaw's fluid world
Sydney-born New York/ Melbourne-based Kate Shaw kicks off Turner Galleries' 2015 artist-in-residence program with an intriguing show of video, print and paintings which demonstrate a slippery fascination with fluidity and change - think oil slides or oil spills, avalanches and lava fields. The jet stream, even.
Her paintings are vivid other- worldly landscapes with a highly- controlled use of colour, reflection, duplication and pattern lending them both an odd familiarity and a sinister undertow. Like Rorschach images or Victorian paper silhouettes, they have a tendency to change in front of your eyes - an aspect of her work made explicit in her lenticular prints.
At first glance, Shaw's paintings seem to be subverting fantasy illustration - picture a sci-fi paperback cover with a pastel-coloured unicorn in front of distant mountains. They exploit that tension between the fantastic and the familiar with restraint, the smooth resin surfaces rejecting any painterly intimacy.
The same cool detachment of her earlier work remains but her images now display a more explicitly Gothic backbone. There are suggestions of drowned trees, overgrown swamps bedecked with hanging mosses, and impossibly still lakes, all rendered through collage, pouring, layering, marbling and optical tropes in an ultra high-key palette of acid greens, pinks and yellows.
A residency in Iceland, with its blasted landscape, informs some of these icy-hot vistas. As do Shaw's travels in Australia's red centre and concern, made particularly explicit in the video works, with issues including global warming, natural disasters, pollution, nuclear testing - and, in the end, indifference.
These are landscapes that, on the one hand, put me in mind of Max Ernst's frottage images of the 1920s and 30s - ruined, melted, places with a chilly stillness about them, as if you are witnessing the silent, lifeless aftermath of catastrophe. On the other hand they put me in mind of mandalas - intricate, brightly coloured works reflecting on their own impermanence. They draw the eye, specifically because they seem, on the surface, innocuous - but the brain knows better.
The two video pieces, Fjall and The Spectator, make these tensions and concerns explicit. These short works ebb and flow with a wash of organic movement and subsumed footage of natural disasters, from volcanic eruptions to avalanches, melting ice shelves and the swell of toxic foam on a polluted coast. People look on, their backs turned to you, seemingly oblivious, or perhaps disinterested, as marine life swims across a viscous candy- coloured sky and the sun sets only to inevitably rise again.
The exhibition's title, Blue Marble, is a reference to the awe the Apollo astronauts felt as the first humans to see the Earth suspended in the black void of outer space. A trio of circular lenticular prints (prints that gives an illusion of depth and move as the image is viewed from different angles) evoke the passing of the seasons, the fluidity of landscapes exposed to time and stresses, the continents and the oceans and, of course, that view of a lonely blue disc.
As the quote from astronaut James Irwin in the exhibition notes describes it: "As we got further and further away, it (the Earth) diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man."
Shaw's works may not change you but they will reward you with their disquieting beauty.
· Catch Orrizonte 1.5, an exhibition of Subiaco-born painter Rob Forlani's evocative colour-soaked canvases, at Gallows Gallery in Mosman Park. This hot-palette gestural, suggestive abstraction is hard to pull off without seeming, well, indulgent.
But Forlani has forged an international career with his eye for mass and weight, a quite exquisite sense of line and sinuous afternotes that linger in the mind like calligraphy.
Kate Shaw's Blue Marble is on until April 11; Rob Forlani's Orrizonte 1.5 is on until March 29.
