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Nancy Spector used words like searching, displacement and expansion when she explored the metaphor of travel in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She reminds us that the laws of narrative can conform to those of travel, reiterating that ' …travel is the movement between two points – a convergence in space and time – the shape of which is drawn as a line on a map'.1
The exhibition 'Traversing Space' by Felicity Spear is a journey that explores and interprets the art of seeing. Her fascination with this topic extends from the use of optical instruments to the effects of light and reflection. Mapping and relating her own maritime experiences, while referencing the historical explorations of Mathew Flinders, Spear delves into the metaphor of travel. The viewer is drawn into a spatial narrative that extends over real time and references the past. Vision, physical interaction, and memory are actively engaged as you trace the undulating topography of Spear's six shaped canvases. Painted, monochromatic, rhythmic patterns wend their way across the wedge shaped canvases in atmospheric blue or the red experienced in a photographic dark room. The linear forms subtly allude to the silhouetted range of hills known as the You Yangs that Spear used to locate a position at sea in her maritime exercise. The glossed horizon is no longer a point of closure but one of transparency and openness. Like the navigator using a sextant, strategically placed mirrors are there to aid us in the act of discovery. This is like a slice of experience somewhere in the middle of a journey where the past and present seem to oscillate.
Together with the paintings that wrap the walls, a