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A pigeon, stuffed and perched on a car seat is an oblique reference to Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. Elsewhere a spirit level placed on a floor sculpture is a matter of structural practicality. There is an abiding tension between the loaded and the incidental in the collaborative practice of Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley. Their recent exhibition is a well-rounded survey of the motifs and concerns evident in work to date. The divergent (but now familiar) vernacular includes hard-edged painting, neon signage, accoutrements of warfare and the use of chairs as an authorial presence.
Upon entry, one encounters walls emblazoned with geometric paintings that bear the numbers of poems from The Collected Works of Emily Dickinson. Throughout her life, Dickinson ordered hundreds of poems into packets according to dates. These were posthumously assigned with numbers which represent an arbitrary labelling system, comparable to the way ‘Untitled’ is used in the genre of abstraction. The paintings here consist of monochromatic panels adjoined in a curious range of contrasting colours, such as magenta, lilac, silver and apple green. Painted on hessian, the hard-edged sensibility is tempered by the generous texture of the backing material. In some, glass panels are included as starting or end points to the compositions. The numbers, all of them three digits long, are painted in white on black, and immediately recall the religious paintings of Colin McCahon and the Mayfair series by Robert MacPherson. On the back wall a multi-panelled painting incorporates nine rows of numbers. It reads like a giant hymn board.
Of course, it is unlikely that even the most erudite Dickinson scholar would recall each of these poems. Nonetheless, there is a nagging pang