After work I drove into Newtown to see Suzan, Alice, Nana and Shelley’s exhibition Everything is good here. Please come home. at the Vanishing Point. I got there an hour early, so I went to the new Pastizzi Café and tried the Ricotta & Chocolate and Cherry & Cheese pastries. They were delicious but not unlike the frozen ones I get in Marrickville and stick in an oven. It’s nice to see this end of Newtown opening good eating places and interesting things because it’s otherwise pretty dreary finding oneself around here.
It is such a tiny gallery and the work took up more proportionally more wall space than in a conventional gallery. However, it was largely a drawing show, so the delicate works, despite being in close quarters, didn’t look crammed in. Nana Sakata’s conjoined line drawings were exceptionally good. You can always see the evidence of a seasoned draftsman, by their economy of line and the fine balance between figure and ground. The results are charmingly child-like and deceptively clever in proportion and execution.
For a fact I know, Suzan has been lugging around a large box of electrical wire for the last three years. Ever since her graduation installation, she has held on to this ‘reverse garbage’ find, as artists do, as a potential working material. I looked at her wire drawings back in 2004 and wondered where on earth it could be going. Well, it’s interesting to see, that it is still going. She now draws with this electrical wire on a kind of ‘canvas’ and the result is much more visually impacting and the line work is more controlled. Some of these (what I’d like to call) 3-dimensional drawings are too cluttered but I particularly liked one (above). It’s heartening to see the evolution of an artist’s work, especially one who is really unafraid of experimentation. Typically these abstract works sat next to a brilliant photo series Dead and Alive, in the way only Suzan could display artwork i.e. completely unbounded by conventions of genre or media-specific practice.
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