The reason for Alien Furlong's and Karen Turnbull 's joint exhibition must surely have been to take advantage of the stark juxtapositions which resulted. Furlong's works are Minimalist, combining painting and assemblage. His media include canvas, balsa, plywood and acrylic paint. Turnbull's work consists of enormous graphite drawings of a dog, a fish, and a shell. Her work is realist, although these 'portraits' call for more than a realist interpretation and/or viewing. The very disparate nature of the works can be apprehended in the initial simplicity of describing Turnbull's work as opposed to the description of Furlong's. The works ' titles underline this difference, Furlong 's Hate is a sandpaper ice cube ... as opposed to Turnbull 's Weimaraner (sic) for instance.
There is a strange twisting or swapping of functions in looking at the works side by side. What Furlong's works claim to represent is evidenced in their titles; California Suite, Decline of New, Some Construct and even not titled. At the same time the works are far removed from the familiar form of claims to represent and from any concept of appearance. We expect nameable objects to be represented yet the works are highly reductive, stripped bare of easily identifiable or describable objects from external 'reality' . Turnbull 's titles on the other hand act to refer; this is a Weimaraner Dog, this a Red Oranda Fish, this an Oriental Spiral Shell. Yet she presents these things as real objects eliding the process through which she has brought them to our attention, her art. We have the sense that these are snap shots from a childhood collection of pets and shells. Portraiture makes one