The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
There's something opaque, something resistive, about Bevan Honey's latest show. With little to hook a critical (or any other) narrative on, interpretations do not come easily. Certainly, it signals, it gestures, but almost mutely, unassertively - it does not seem to ask for much. Maybe it is content with just 'being itself'; maybe there is a bit of Popeye's 'I yam what I yam…' about it all…
Take the show's title: Wood Cuts & Charcoals. lt is purely descriptive. So, in the long, narrow hall of the Fremantle Arts Centre we are hardly shocked to find neat, strongly graphic and beautifully crafted charcoal images and flattish, wooden, skeletal wall-sculptures. And, what these works have in common, form/content-wise, is that they appear to be geometric diagrams - pared back, spare, precise short-hand 'descriptions' of objects that might exist on either the micro or macro level of our 'real world'.
Well, it would seem we do have at least something of a 'theme', and it allows us to get a foot in the door. But still, Honey plays his cards close to his chest: there are no wall or catalogue notes offering us any accessible intellectual context. So we are not told (in triumphant tones) that, say, 'these works interrogate the follies of the discursive formations of. . .' He doesn't pre-empt or spoon-feed us. Honey seems to want us to think hard ... and as we do, it begins, slowly, to fall into place: it is ultimately 'about' the puzzle of representations - the way they are both physical things in themselves and images of something else ... oh, and one could mumble something about the difference between sign and