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A screw is a metal device which is driven into wood with the aid of a screwdriver to assemble and secure parts of a building construction. When I was at school it meant a fuck. A few years ago on T.V. it signified the despised authority of a prison warder and reflected the domination and repression experienced by prison inmates.
Physicality, for Sydney artist Rosemary Laing, is loaded-she aims to make the structures of her works containers in themselves.
In her series, Natural Disasters, she looks beyond the flat surface traditions of painting and photography to the network of information systems which structure our social reality. Prefabricated aluminium strips replace wooden stretchers. Polished stainless steel strips running through the centre of the work mimic the linear flash of the passage of information.
Long collaged photographic panoramas recall the way memory selectively telescopes media saturated events.
Named after Heidelberg school works, each piece depicts a natural disaster-flood, fire, drought and cyclone. The subject appears to be at odds with its format. The artist clarifies the link: "The materials used in the form of my recent and proposed works reflect our contemporary environment", she says. "In lieu of the 'nature' of the traditional formats of painting, photography and sculpture, it explores 'second nature"'
In his essay, "Collapsing the Interval" 1, Edward Slopek casts some light on what Laing might mean by this term 'second nature'. Investigating the way communication technologies have restructed information itself Slopek argues that, in a shrinking world where the movement of information is virtually instantaneous, geographic areas collapse into isochronic points, location is transcended, and, in the process, history is extinguished. The result, he claims, is a rearticulation... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline