Selling off the herd: John Smith
Shelagh Morgan and John Smith live at Eureka, New South Wales, which is relevant to the different positions they take towards 'the landscape' in their recent concurrent exhibitions at Legge Gallery.
Upstairs at the gallery, Shelagh Morgan installed two series of seven works, one in book form, the other, wall assemblages. The assemblage paintings are constructed with multi-layered Shelagh Morgan, site #4.92, 1992. Multi-media on layered perspex. sheets of perspex (usually three) bound in wooden frames. Each layer represents a facet of Morgan's style of 'archeological' sifting through the memories and histories not only of the geographical siting of the work but of her own 'collection' and recollection of it. These works classify and quantify. On the topmost layer of each work we see a grid, an imposed systemic structure through which we can move visually only when we ascertain our own position: once we see one layer above the next, we are given a choice of focusses. Next, we observe Morgan's own subjectivity- this is the second level, where she includes herself/her shadow as an active, if detached, participant of her surrounds. Under grid, over evidence, Morgan ambiguously casts a shadow of doubt over her own place in this schema. Represented as shadow, Morgan both realises her existence and negates any emotive presence within it. Her conspicuous absence-ofpresence/ presence-of-absence denoted via the incidental fall of the shadow, finds a dispassionate link to her own origins. The background panel in these assemblages is a synthesis of the artist's previous investigations: photographic documentation, site specific artifacts, random notes, layered with the residual images of the other panels, all of which come crashing down as near information saturation (being on perspex all