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DOIN' STUFF

MARLEY DAWSON'S MACHINE-SITES

Adam Geczy
Eyeline 72
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Marley Dawson’s sculptural installations are things that either do something or are about the process of making something that eventually does something. The ‘doing’ is largely basic: to do with movement such as shifting or rolling. These works are typically elaborate, labour-intensive, mildly theatrical and suffused with an air of urgency. But it is urgency without a direction. It is groundless and ends in a void. A cube within a frame supported by another frame gyrates according to a mechanical crank; turnbelt supports and a shaft with no discernible beginning lead a brick into a hole—these are cryptic mechanisms of entropy and containment (Big One Liner, 2008). Other installations have a handyman, hands-on, workshop-like quality. But if they promise much, they deliver little by way of anything materially useful or operational. They are laboratories replete with ideas, and independent of purpose.

The emphasis on making, process and labour in Dawson’s work has found its natural expression in the language of the studio and the workshop, the places of germination and decision-making. They are the spaces of subjective disorder and experimentation that exist prior to the gallery, the neutral space of aesthetic resolution in which the artist is, to some extent, laid to rest. In Dawson’s work, the artist is always circulating, not as an heroic, suffocating or suffering ego but as a routinely functional component, analogous to the voice on a do-it-yourself DVD, or a digital tutorial. The impulse in Dawson’s work is to make something that continually promises to reveal how it got there.

This cryptic relationship usually crystallises in work that threatens to undermine its own resolution. The installation, She’s not structural (2007), bears this out... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Big One Liner, 2008. Wood, ply, plastic, conveyor belt, electrics, bricks, 300 x 450 x 230cm. Installation view Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney. Photograph: Moshe Rosenberg.

Big One Liner, 2008. Wood, ply, plastic, conveyor belt, electrics, bricks, 300 x 450 x 230cm. Installation view Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney. Photograph: Moshe Rosenberg.

Ol’smokey, 2008. Smoke machine, electrics, lycra, card, timber, light, 60 x 80 x 170cms. Installation views Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney. Photographs: Kat Barron.

Ol’smokey, 2008. Smoke machine, electrics, lycra, card, timber, light, 60 x 80 x 170cms. Installation views Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney. Photographs: Kat Barron.