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This exhibition, presented in association with the Sydney Samuel Beckett Symposium, was conceived originally as being installed in a mezzanine space within the Wharf Theatre complex on Sydney Harbour, where the symposium and various performances were taking place. At the eleventh hour, however, this venue became unavailable, and the exhibition was installed in the gallery space.
This change of venue was not such a bad idea, I thought. While showing the works at the wharf space would have connected them directly to the symposium, and reached a different audience, the tenor of the exhibition was suited to the modestly-scaled hermetic environment of Scott Donovan's first-floor gallery space, situated in downtown Sydney amidst Chinatown and the Spanish Quarter.
I am not a scholar of Beckett's work, but for me the exhibition seemed to capture a particular kind of sparseness and disquietude. In his catalogue essay, Alex Gawronski highlights the 'spatial and sculptural dimensions' of Beckett's work, in that 'His characters often inhabit or are oppressed by the circumstances in which they find themselves, whether featureless wastelands or confining architectonic spaces, boxes, barrels or garbage bins'. The exhibition did not feel claustrophobic, but there was a sense of alienation, albeit at a low level. Showing in the main gallery space were a photographic frieze by Ryszard Dabek, three-dimensional works by Alex Gawronski and Stephen Birch, and a video work by Tony Schwensen. In the adjoining project space was a sound installation by Jasmine Guffond and Torben Tilly.
The first surprise was that Birch 's work, Civic Minded, initially seemed invisible. The work consists of a pair of fabricated tree-trunks, hovering just above the floor to allow a pair of men's shoes to