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Second Nature is Fiona Macdonald's latest exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art. This title, Second Nature, suggests easy, familiar modalities of thought and action. Second Nature is an almost unknowing and automatic habitual response pattern. Macdonald views second nature as a 'parallel universe', however the exhibition presents a darker and more sinister registration around the notions implicit in the title. This particular parallel universe is ominous, unstable and threatening.
The combinations of Reductions or specimens as Macdonald calls them create a disturbing series of relations between the works themselves and their content. The specimens for our delectation are that of the landscape, painting, image, monochrome and object. The artist states that 'The idea of reduction refers to a condition of dumbness. These works are dumb-in both senses of the word. They are mute silent objects and also stupid or stupefied-they have been dumbed down'.
The viewer enters a ground zero envelope of space. Macdonald has emphasised the qualities of the ill-proportioned room allocated to her by choosing a dingy, even gloomy lighting system. This enhances the peculiar energy of the similarly ill proportioned and oddly emanating array of objects.
The denser spaces of theoretical discourse are immediately suggested with two photographs of a moonlit scene of a cliff and the sea. Both photographs are roughly stapled to their support. In the first of these images the viewer is able to project into and through the landscape, to become one with it and be swept up into a sense of the sublime. The glimmering light of the image is extraordinary. In contrast, the other photograph is a surly intervention. Here the image has been supplemented to the level of