The Mark Tanner Sculpture award show selectee succeeds in celebrating the generic.
Frances Richardson fills the gallery with eight works, sculptures proposed made of plywood, ash wood, concrete canvas, pencil, chipboard, paint, golden madrone wood veneer, metal, Perspex, walnut wood, copper leaf, walnut wood chips et cetera. The exhibition has a sentiment of a folk’s folk collaborating their gardening and DYI projects in the suburbs. Dilettantish.
Split wood is a sculpture to be ignored. Divider is really the first piece that opens the exhibition, a long brown branch protruding from the wall, protecting it seemed, the two brusquely cornered concrete canvases. The viewer is given the choice to stay outside or walk in close proximity to explore the wall based sculptures, I did, I walked vis-à-vis to them and found the two hacked upon the edges and in parallel form of each other. Still made no sense why to reference ghosts, here was a democratic spatial proposition for the viewer in relation to the gallery space, and for the that case to be reckoned by the artist using natural materials such as ash wood makes for no sense, as the sensibility of ash wood knows no order of a human idea created, left or right.
Next, A thought drawn, a time-based-patient enduring piece presenting plus and minus symbols in orderly boxes, a presentation of optical illusionism from the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel movement with an emphatic display of Richardson presenting her rational view on the world through literal representation, the repetition becomes not contemplative but wincing. It seems the piece was created as though to create intellectual leverage of the directionless natural based sculptures.
To write about the rest of the sculptures here on is pointless. The room is filled with what typically and all too typically with RCA MA graduates, the gentrified sculptural syntax, long piece walnut wood planks are propped on the wall displaying the sensitivity of the “placing”, wood veneer is curled and held together with metal clippings, in between the cylindrical veneers playing the mimesis for trees, Perspex glass sits creating sculptural drama, I blew on them to see if they would budge, they did, very sensitive, and finishing the end of the woody exhibition – a walnut wood pole propped in the corner, wrapped in copper leaf. Copper leaf… the ex mistress of every art student.
Not even nothing can be free of ghosts is a lazy attempt to poeticize a dull show that attempted to heightened the sensitivity of the viewer through a natural based materials artist attempting to adopt the command of materials like that of Robert Smithson. A base disappointment to the formal progressions of sculpture.
The exhibition delivers air, or, even nothing.