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It would be fair to say that James Angus's early work dealt with the spatial qualities of objects in relationship to certain systems of commercial or industrial production. His early works included a system of conveyor belts ferrying small plastic objects in an endless closed circuit, a constellation of internally illuminated tiny plastic toys, and light-globes whose filaments were meticulously twisted into the shapes of cartoon characters and corporate logos.
Angus's fascination with the recombinant possibilities within systems included series of transistor radios and electric can-openers of which the component parts had been dissembled and cast in coloured plastic. The reassembled facsimile objects thus presented a set of possible colour combinations, and the objects themselves, presented in a grid pattern , became elements of a larger sequential system. These works also played upon the possibilities for inducing perceptual shifts via the alteration of a recognisable object. Rhinoceros, first exhibited in the 1996 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, dramatically demonstrated this effect, inducing a physical and psychological shift in our perception of the object itself and the space in which it was installed. Entirely realistic in 'appearance', the adolescent male rhino was sculpted in clay, cast in fibreglass, spray-painted fluorescent yellow and mounted horizontally on the wall. Like the life-size giraffe cast in pink rubber, exhibited at Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, a year later, the rhino appeared as a giant toy or hallucination. But its placement on the wall also had the effect of 'tipping' the entire gallery space on its side. Angus's recent works also play with the relativity of scale, as well as employing other spatio- temporal devices to confound our expectations of what we think are familiar... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline