Over recent years the work of Rodney Spooner has revolved around an examination and manipulation of those formal relations between objects, images and environments which construct meanings and shape perception. Sculptural installations and paintings created through the expressive use of industrial materials such as wood, concrete and steel, his work is marked by a series of tensions between surface and depth , solidity and gravity. While this contrast between the material and the immaterial could well allude to traditional arguments over "soft” and "hard" sculpture raised by Minimalism, Spooner's art addresses the issue of its own staging through a parodic doubling of the formal structure of sites and spaces.
Strategically positioned along the walls and floor of gallery spaces or grafted onto the structure of bridges and buildings, previous work s such as Civilised Obsession (1992-1994), Sound Foundation (1993) and Enlightenment (1993) conjure up ideas of objects and spaces in both transition and transformation. Appearing, at times, to float in mid-air, these strangely voluminous constructions, influenced by conceptual art practices of the 1960s, oscillate between a compulsive desire to fill space and the magnification of a profound but utterly disorientating emptiness. Spooner's most recent exhibition at Selenium in Sydney is characterised by this precisely this tension.
Consisting of two distinct formal components, Another Room (1995) combines three flat and saturated blue rectangles painted directly onto each of the main walls with a raised concrete floor that tapers from the entrance into the open space of the room like the sloping sands of some inviting beach. Contrasting ideas o f weightlessness (the large hovering blue shapes) with 1.7 tonnes of formless mass (the rough concrete floor), Spooner cleverly entices the viewer... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline