undo the day

The COVID-19 pandemic acquainted the world with a condition of suspension which, I’ve heard many artists say, was not unlike the way they were already accustomed to living: staying in their own domains and immersing themselves in projects of indeterminate shape and duration. Who could know in 2019 that the drive for measurable productivity which defines the working lives of most in our society, would cease so dramatically and for so long, leaving each of us to ponder our purpose.

The curatorial notes for undo the day, an exhibition at Sydney’s National Art School Gallery featuring works by ten contemporary Australian artists, make no mention of the pandemic but it is hard not to see the show in light of the adjustments made to our shared consciousness over the last four years. Proceeding from the observation that times of brooding can, for all their discomfort, deliver us to personal growth, Gina Mobayed’s exhibition asserts that artists have always been our guides in hard times and presents her selection of early to mid-career artists who do so today. As the exhibition publicity puts it, “The artists in undo the day explore the visceral ways we lose, search, and discover ourselves in times of change, only to have love, hope, or desire bloom again in new forms and perhaps outside of the bounds we once defined for ourselves.”

This theme, or something quite like it, has been tacit within the content of a great deal of art for a very long time, yet the intelligence of curatorship required to bring it to overt articulation in a group show is considerable, for  unless an artist is explicitly expressing or participating in some act of overcoming adversity, the theme might well be better left to rise naturally to the surface. undo the day proceeds at the risk of labouring an elusive quality and, to heighten the stakes, favours work that carry few clear cues of the personal, social or artistic contexts that formed them. If the artists do share some cultural setting it is the stage of Australian art on which most of them are prominent.

The show put me in mind of a mediocre mixtape: a sequence of works purporting to meaning but manifesting nothing particularly memorable. Downstairs in the gloaming (side A) the main source of light is Mel O’Callaghan’s projected video of a man on a phone in a windswept place of sand and water, liminal, and boring. Two works from Coen Young’s ongoing series of “mirror paintings” look leaden in the low light and surely prove that the idea is past its date of expiry. I’m mystified as to what I am supposed to value in the small, semi-abstract landscape paintings of Irene Hanenbergh but Ruth Hutchinson’s tiny sculptures do make a bewitching impression, charging the ground with intimations of invisible life. Ronan Pirozzi’s paintings made on pieces of cut and welded steel also invoke mystery. Tough and shielding, they nevertheless quiver with a touch that bespeaks vulnerability, proving that trust in abstraction to convey specific emotions is not misplaced but simply not applied consistently here.

Upstairs, in the light of a windowed room (side B), Jodie Whalen’s video has clouds with silver linings, rainbows and colour fields. As with O’Callaghan’s video, the soundtrack is inescapable throughout the room. Two large paintings by Karen Black are thinner than anything I’ve seen her paint before and disappointingly recursive to dabs, dribbles and other default actions common to contemporary painting. Tom Polo finds neon lighting a good medium for the slightness of his imagery, while Nabilah Nordon’s sculptures and Nathan Hawkes’ drawings get in each other’s way at the junction of figuration and abstraction, which is a shame because Hawkes’ drawings possess imagination and individual character.   

This is not a show in which the gallery spaces reverberate with an exchange between exhibits; after two visits I could still not recall any distinctive juxtaposition that favoured the works involved, much less a defining spatial flow. The word visceral may appear in the rationale, but with a few exceptions the works simply don’t manifest the thoroughgoing aesthetic transformation required to do justice to the theme. 

Yet the theme is a serious one with far-reaching implications. If the soul-searching some artists enact through their work has something to show us about the nature of our time on earth, then not only is art a thing of great value, but a thing which becomes most relevant to an audience when the artist is free to gravitate to existential questions. This is an important counter-argument to the charges of solipsism that have often been leveled at the self-centred, studio-dwelling artist. undo the day undoes its own argument with a display that may be in accord with current curatorial taste but fails to attain transcendence.

EXHIBITION
undo the day
14 June – 3 August 2024
National Art School Galleries, Sydney