Art—official—oasis
Art-Official-Oasis is the first project Eloise Lindsay and Bruce McCalmont have worked on together and the result was a cacophony of images and ideas which, whilst struggling against each other, managed to attain a remarkable coalescence.
The piece consisted of a wooden structure which read as a schematic house captured in the split second of its explosion. Wood, floorboards, door frames (or these item's formal referents) spun out to the walls away from an unoccupied children's chair lit by a naked light and an unwatched and untuned TV set. In front of this and acting like a barrier to the timid Sydney installation art public was a row of potted plastic flowers.
The 'exploding' house (and variants thereof) has been a recurring motif in McCalmont's work over the past year and a half. It is both an ironic and a tragic juxtaposition. The concerns inherent in such a structure are manifold. There is both a fear of and a desire for the irremediable breaking up of such an icon of stability as the house (or rather home). Yet the structure does not signify mere destruction so much as a process of explosion and this can be seen (with a certain optimism) as an exaggerated form of expansion or even evolution.
It is a very neat encapsulation of entropy considering how implausible it is that such a thing can be neatly encapsulated. Within this the blue chair acted as an anchor or life line, something which sustains an innocence and a recognition that our existence is as much bound up with the random association of childhood as with the conditioned responses of what is learnt. Lindsay developed this exploration within the