Determinant lines, edges, and forms define the layered states of being, memory, and boundaries in the work of these 5 emergent artists. While the content of the work may be communicated through contours and composition, these artists also challenge representational means in their translation of real, pictorial, and cultural space. These translations occur by creating hybrids within traditional mediums, observing and recording zones of reality that contemplate our society’s preoccupations, and using recognisable forms to comment on iconoclastic aspirations. Contours + Conditions concerns how these artists create, distil, and negate physical and cultural boundaries.

The collision of sculpture, painting and photography in the works by Kate Woods explore conceptual spaces that have been originally appropriated from nostalgic paintings and illustrations. Inspired by images of land art sites of the 1970s, where artists had to delineate how their projects would be realised in public space, Woods uses this foundation to imagine her own interventions. The artist inserts abstracted sculptures onto the picture plane, which is then re-photographed, and sometimes cropped, presenting multiple possibilities of a non-existent, shifting landscape. Flattened and compressed by photography, the resulting imagery opens alternatives for how different media may successfully cooperate.

 

Photographer Sam Hartnettshares an interest in borders and potential liminal states in existing architecture, tourist sites, public monuments, and abandoned interiors. His practice has been dedicated to a scavenger hunt of spaces that are on the verge of self-collapse and visual contradiction, cleverly emphasised by his use of framing. Images often focus on pivotal seams – where edges of two tense worlds meet and common sense unravels. Hartnett’s recent ongoing series documented precise areas of Europe, which were in transition and held a wealth of interpretations. The spaces in their mundane glory seem to be transient apparitions or perhaps portals that comment on our dysfunctional management of our surroundings. The images speak of false desires and quick, often unconsidered solutions.

 

In Room Two, Jessica Pearless renegotiates the traditional platform from which works are viewed. Her vinyl installations cross borders from walls onto more untraditional surfaces – floors, ceilings, windows. For Contours + Conditions, Pearless has utilised Bauhaus motifs and principles,enveloping the architecture, and in essence abstracting it. The installation intuitively responds to the conditions and context of the site-specific space and encourages viewers to be vigilant in their experience of how galleries and interiors are routinely used.  This awareness is immediate, breaking the standard eye line when encountering the installation and reveals Pearless’s curious, exploratory nature. Other works in vinyl also use geometric components to create dialogues within confines of a support structure and frame.

 

Pulling away from structural spaces, Rabdeep's contribution reflects personal and identity-based boundaries in relation to masculinity, fashion, and pop culture. Rabdeep (a single moniker a la Madonna) interprets household and recognisable items into polished sculptures that often contain a sense of humour, self-denial, and wit. For example, the perfect silhouette of untouched lipstick protrudes from a glistening tube, in a reflective sculpture which enlarges the item’s original scale. The reference to lipstick implies desire and transformation, while its mirrored skin will no doubt allow onlookers to preen and self-examine under the pretence of viewing the object. A collection of ceramic wigs also references a self-conscious and brutal obsession of gazing and being gazed upon. The wigs’ silhouettes are based on the queen of public ‘hot messes’: Britney Spears.

 

Liyen Chong uses hair in a different way to address the distance between language and culture, reality and metaphysical desire. Sharing a similar precision with Hartnett, Chong’s hand-embroidered pieces use the artist’s own hair to define the ivory pictorial expanse of her ‘canvas’ with strokes of ebony lines. The striking contrast of the dark strands against a snow-white field infers other time immemorial dualities: whole and empty, existing and dying, truth and mystery. The significant imagery, in this instance unicursal mazes, reveals a meditative space where one can enter and exit, only to have made a full revolution and returned to the point of origin. This cyclic process, mimicking the growth and death of the proteinous material itself, may infer that while boundaries can be erected and crossed, they also need to be fully traversed in order to feel their impact and ascertain their intentions.