Installations
As part of Singapore’s 2005 ‘Celebrate Australia’ month , an annual event instituted in 2002, Australians Cassandra Schultz and Karee Dahl showed two site-specific installations in the elegant white-cube space of the National Institute of Education’s Art Gallery (NIE). Respectively titled Pouch and …so long and so distant…, the two works, Dahl’s sited on the gallery’s cavernous ground flour and Schultz’s in the cube’s more intimate mezzanine space, effectively explored concepts of space, memory, history, communication and pan-cultural relationships.
Both artists have been based in Singapore for some time—Schultz having also lived in the City-State as a child—and as a result the work shown at NIE not only sought specifically to engage local viewers, but also played confidently on a register familiar to the home audience in this cosmopolitan and culturally hybrid part of the world.
Schultz’s Pouch (initially conceptualised in 2004) was developed in three parts that could easily have been exhibited separately but were shown in tandem as a single installation, gave extra weight and colour to her central theme of communication and cultural alignment /mis-alignment. Ascending steep stairs to the gallery’s long mezzanine corridor, the viewer first encountered a series of life-size models of animals in glass cases. Lined up at chest-level, these deliberately mimicked a conventional natural history museum display, precisely arranged and somewhat clinical in feel. On closer inspection however, the animals seemed oddly unnatural, even to a non-Australian unfamiliar with indigenous Australian fauna. Schultz’s labels and wall text offered clarification: her molded three-dimensional animals replicated fauna depicted in 18th century engravings produced in England from drawings by English naturalists who accompanied the first Europeans exploring the Australian continent. The explorer-naturalists’ drawings were inaccurate... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline