Its not black and white…
Site: Blue Lagoon/ Red Ochre Beach, Dodges Ferry Tasmania
Oil on unstretched canvas and 13 Masonite clip boards.
Approximately 6000 x 1500 cm, POA
Its not all black and White
There are two distinct spaces within the exhibition. From the foyer, you enter a small dark room where the window is blocked out, and you are surrounded, 360 degrees, by canvas, hanging like sails from eyelets above. It appears monochromatic, dramatic, a panorama of land and sea, vast but contained in the small room - you can’t step back to comprehend the view nor get your bearings.
It appears to be simply Black and White, a binary that has had and continues to have devastating misunderstanding and discourse. Yet under this work (It’s not black and white...) hang 13 individual clipboards, with a couple of squares of individual colours, then a mess of black paint indicative of the mixing mess of an artist’s palette. The canvas above is unified by a horizon line, the sea below and the landform above. The view from Blue Lagoon/ Red Ochre Beach, Dodges Ferry, the artist's home. As you step closer, the marks no longer act as pictorial clues but abstract shapes and traces and if you look hard, you begin to see hints of colour in the black. Some have a greenish tinge, some blue, some brown and crimson, and even rich dark purples - it’s at that moment you realise all the blacks on the canvas are simply mixed colours.
Hanging directly opposite is another canvas in a similar format but it has text and several ribbons of gray scale. The text appears naive and erratic, and the pictorial space is complicated and multi-layered. It contrasts dramatically with its sister work yet at the same time also compliments and intensifies. It wasn’t until I read Mark Sayers book ‘a non-anxious presence’ did I prophetically feel the impact of this tonal study. Sayers explains The Gray Zone, is a loaded term, reaching from personal moral dilemmas to conflict terminology, weaponizing the polarization of opinions. I began to see post Covid lockdown and the 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum we were living in a gray zone.
Both works line up with the door architraves creating the illusion of being one continuous work, only disrupted by the architecture of the room.