ann-maree reaney, mona ryder, ann wulff
The Art Gallery at Singapore's National Institute of Education {NI E) was the venue recently for Grip, an exhibition by Australian artists Ann-Maree Reaney, Mona Ryder and Ann Wulff.
Though small, showcasing but a single installation by each practitioner, Grip was also neat and well-formed, affording its Singapore audience a cross-section illustrating the variety and depth of current conceptual and visual directions in Australian contemporary practice.
Viewed singly, Mona Ryder's Stretched and to a lesser degree Ann Wulff's The Lachrymist could be construed as gender pieces; however any gender agendas melted into the background of subtler, stronger and less limiting themes exploring emotion, communication, the interpretation of signs in public and private contexts, and visual re-appropriation of ready-made codes, text and image.
Visually, Grip was perfectly at home in the NIE gallery's sober white cube. Dominating the threesome, Ryder's Stretched, the show's most sculptural piece, could be viewed both from outside, through the gallery's eight metre fagade-window and, more dramatically, from above from the gallery's mezzanine twelve metre balcony.
Stretched is another of Ryder's 'stocking' works, which she has shown over recent years. Here, several dozen pairs of women's stocking, dyed blood red, were dangled, stretched or pinned from a grid installed eight metres from the gallery floor. The only artist of the three to make concessions to Grip's Asian stop, Ryder stuffed her stocking-figures' abdominal area with locally-purchased pastel-coloured kitchen receptacles-colanders, bowls, sieves. Without seeming contrived, the addition of the made-in-China plastic utensils gave an extra dimension to the work's discourse of problematised domesticity and fragility. Was it Ryder's intention to allude to Asia's sex trade that transforms its women into cheap, mass-consumed-and-trashed commodities, like so many kitchen. strainers