Group exhibition featuring Nick Selenitch, Kirra Jamison, Paul Yore & Valentina Palonen
Curated by Mitchel Brannan
20 April 2012- 12 May 2012
West Space
“Colour threatens – or promises – to undo all the hard-won
achievements of culture. It threatens – or promises – chaos and irregularity.
Colour threatens disorder – but also promises liberty.”[1]
Rainbow Eaters brings together the work of four contemporary artists who use
emphatic and flamboyant combinations of colour to create talismanic imagery. In
their use of rhythmic and repetitious making practices, each artist has a sense
of ritual in their work, compiling colour into discordant and lurid
arrangements, and it is through this process that they explore intuitive,
mystical and sensorial understandings of the world.
The exhibition is predicated on two interrelated interests that have
recently gained traction within contemporary art around the country. A burgeoning interest in the aesthetics of
neo-shamanism and other forms of mysticism, manifest in some fine art and
increasingly within popular culture, informs the premise of the show, as does
the recent use by some artists of bright, jarring and psychedelic colours.
Exhibitions around the country over the last twelve months have articulated this
dual interest in different ways. New
Psychedelia at the University of Queensland Art Museum acknowledged a trend
amongst some contemporary Australian artists to reference the visual tropes of
60’s psychedelia – swirling arrangements of rainbow colours that speak of
metaphysical or spiritual experience. The exhibition Pagan Pop at
Canberra Contemporary Art Space explored the recent interest in pagan and
neo-shamanic aesthetic sensibilities. A dominant theme of that show was the
acknowledgement of the artists of the ways in which these sensibilities have, in
some ways, been co-opted by commercial and mainstream interests. While these concerns inform the premise of
Rainbow Eaters, the idea of the talisman is also central to work in this
show – that an object, created through obsessive and ritualistic making
practices, might be imbued with a sense of mystical or spiritual potency. It is proposed that perhaps it is the sensual
and enigmatic nature of colour that often leads these artists to favour
intuitive and ritualized practices over academicism and cynicism.
British artist David Batchelor, in his 2000 book Chromophobia, argues
that a long-standing and insidious aversion to colour is evident throughout much
of the history of Western thought, which he defines as the eponymous
‘Chromophobia’. One aspect of this aversion, he argues, is largely based on the
association of colour with the exotic, the Oriental, the queer, the primitive –
colour, put simply, has often landed on the wrong side of Descartes’ duality of
the physical and metaphysical, and has thus been routinely regarded as “...
other to the higher values of Western culture.”[2] The work of the artists in this
exhibition is perhaps best characterized, then, by the opposite of Chromophobia
– Chromophilia. For the chromophiliac,
the otherness and exoticism of colour is not ignored or reviled; this is in
fact, precisely its appeal. Colour can offer “a glimpse of the ‘Other World’, a
world beyond Nature and the Law, a world undimmed by language, concepts,
meanings and uses.”[3]
It is understandable then that an interest in lurid, psychedelic colour
often comes coupled with an exploration of mysticism, spirituality and the
occult; or perhaps that an exploration of the mystical is often performed
through colour. In Rainbow Eaters these two concerns are intimately
entwined.
In her sculptural work, Valentina Palonen enacts ritual by casting.
Though the act of casting is itself inherently ritualistic, Palonen often
subjects her casts to further ritualized practices. In recent work the artist
reverentially returns the original pieces (rocks, sticks, shells) to the natural
environments from which they were sourced. Many of her cast objects are also
wrapped in ribbon before being wall mounted – like the upturned horseshoe, the
piece is given the quality of a charm, a protective talisman. The sculpture,
Virvon, Varvon, a large tree branch wrapped in skeins of multi-coloured
ribbon and adorned with resin casts, is an extension of this practice. Through a ritualistic mummification of her
object in rainbow hues, referencing Finnish Easter traditions, the artist gives
the otherwise banal branch a sense of magical significance. Overtly synthetic
casts of vegetables, shells and stones are affixed to the branch, and a shrine
of sorts is created where natural objects are rendered magical and sacred
through an infusion of plastic, rainbow colours.
The work of Nick Selenitsch has often implicitly explored the
relationship of colour and culture. In his series Psychic Income, of
which three drawings are presented here, currency symbols from around the world
are drawn in concentric circles. Each symbol bleeds and ebbs into others in
vibrations of lurid colour; Dollars, Yen, Euros and pounds, through repetition
and pattern, begin to lose their symbolic potency and start to assimilate into
an optically vibrating circular talisman. The use of colour in these works is
the undoing of symbolism, where the vibrancy of Selenitsch’s concentric rings
visually disturbs and begins to break down – to corrode – the legibility, and
authority, of his content. Here the
intuitive, sensory experience of colour works in stark opposition to, and begins
to undo, the definitive rationalism of modern economics. By playfully
questioning the interrelation of spirituality and economics (of intuition and
rationality), these works posit mysticism and unknowability as valid frameworks
for engaging with the world.
Kirra Jamison’s work, Surrender Star IV, also utilizes the
circular motif, but here it is rendered in delicate threads of rainbow
colours. The artist laboriously compiles
fragments of opaque gouache and vinyl, slowly constructing the complex network
of her talismanic web. Colours are laid down intuitively as the work develops,
the colour of each fragment informed by its neighbour, and this process is
continued until the web is complete. The curved and straight threads of colour
and circular composition are reminiscent of a dream-catcher, and this
connotation is more than a purely formal one. Jamison’s colour-wheel becomes, by
virtue of the artist’s obsessive colouring, a kind of magical charm – to
protect, dazzle or perhaps, like the gossamer threads of the spider’s web, to
ensnare. While Batchelor elaborates on
the notion of colour as an intoxicant that undoes the logic and rationality of
language and culture, Jamison here links this connotation with the magical, the
mythical, and the talismanic. Here colour is a mythical portal, a cryptic
symbol writ in vibrant hues that could be a map to Batchelor’s ‘Other
World’.
Obsessively gathering, compiling, hybridizing, bastardizing and
cannibalizing consumer detritus, Paul Yore constructs shrines from the synthetic
hyper-colour and lurid noise of capitalism. Gaudy, kitsch and saturated in
fragmented imagery, the artist’s installations mimic the attention-grabbing
chromatic strategies of advertising and popular culture, but their fecundity
transforms them into something wholly different. In Blessed Be Bieber,
the collection of capitalist detritus is presented as a site of devotion, an
altar to that most plastic, manufactured and gaudy of consumer products,
Canadian pop star Justin Bieber. The piece is a plastic ecosystem which seethes
with life – far from judging or mocking the subject of his shrine, however, Yore
acts as a genuinely curious bower-bird observing and gathering profusions of
colourful stuff into mystical, living nests.
All of the artists in Rainbow Eaters use colour to invoke the
unknowable. Colour eludes rational categorization, and in doing so it gives
access to a sensorial, intuitive understanding of the world. In creating their
polychromatic agglomerations, the artists explore the possibility of colour as a
gateway – a portal to a world that defies rationalism and logic and embraces the
primal, the intuitive and the magical.
