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DIGESTIONS

A mass of questions.

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Nick Cave, 2016 // Until, Carriageworks, Sydney | At once infinite and intimate, finite yet kaleidoscopic, both garish and hypnotic, the more beautiful I found this exhibition the more frightened I became. Moving through these works I felt surrounded: threatened not enveloped in this mesmerising suspended galaxy. It is, in all its beauty, strangely alienating. Here is a thousand tiny universes that all contain contradictions and refract their own light in an intimidating way. Each piece by Missouri artist Nick Cave is named mythically: Crystal Cloudscape, Flow/Blow, Kinetic Spinner Forest, but they all make an emphatic point about gun violence and the spectre of racism in America. This weirdly violent Wonderland contains glittering teardrops, spinning handguns and spray-painted racist gnomes. The gallery wide installation sprawls across three rooms and countless media, forcing us to be amazed but also afraid of its overwhelming and overpowering presence. I felt miniature and mundane in its vastness. | @sashapotatoes

Cameron Robbins, Wind Machine Drawings, 2013-14 // Dynamics of Air, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne | Apologies for giving in to the Melbourne stereotype by commenting incessantly on the weather, but I can't avoid the connection between the agency of nature in these works and the chaos that the city is thrown into when the wind and rain turn against us. When the heavens opened last week any structural control we thought we had was lost: shopping centres flooded, plans ruined, transport halted, shoes drenched. It becomes a friendly reminder of what we are ultimately at the mercy of. Robbins' drawings displayed at the RMIT gallery a month or so ago were drawn by the wind. Robbins names them as though spotting shapes in clouds, 'Snake and Egg' or 'Crocodile' for example, whereas all I can see is the power, beauty and elegance of natural forces that at their strongest will always ultimately out do us. | @mase_windu

“Deviation”, Li Shan 2014 // Super Natural, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney | This swarm of giant humanoid insect beasts suspended from the ceiling of the shaft foyer linger in your peripheral vision as you ascend the gallery floors, each time gaining a new angle of the intricate species Li Shan has crafted from casts of his own body. The muscular but exposed human half is fused with the ferocity of arachnid mega fauna to produce a wholly frightening prototype of the possibilities of a biotechnical future. They remind me terrifyingly of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz but there’s kind of a Promethean foreboding in there too... what could happen if we pushed the limits of science to its post-human extreme? @sashapotatoes

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