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After maintaining a low-key operation for almost a year without either a gallery or an exhibition programme, Michael Milburn reopened late last year with installations by Mike Parr and lmants Tillers. The new gallery is quite small, taking up just two rooms and the built-in verandah of an old "Queenslander" diagonally opposite Brisbane's New Farm park. The main exhibition space is a pure white cube built into what was the lounge room, effacing architectural features such as a bay window and timber walls in favour of a neutral, anonymous modernism. By establishing a controlled environment within the domestic scale and lived-in ambience of the rest of the space, the gallery itself contributes to the reading of the installation. Unlike work which might end up hanging on any sort of wall, surrounded by furniture, family life and views out the window, both installations seemed to explicitly require the formality of the gallery—to aspire to the status of carefully placed "museum pieces".
Imants Tillers' Telepathic Music presented something of a stylistic departure from his better known modular paintings, although the nine canvas boards that form part of the work are sequentially numbered, in keeping with the view that all his work is part of One Painting. In simple descriptive terms, the work consisted of a cluster of nine music stands each supporting a single canvas board. However, rather than containing "appropriated" images, the "notation" on each board was more self-referential.
As Tillers explains it in the catalogue which was produced to accompany the exhibition, the images on the boards are actually derived from reflections produced by the coincidental interaction of the music stands and the sun in the artist's Sydney studio -