Elinor Grace Pickard, Nicole Mather, Nike Savvas
Then I lost my centre
Fighting the world
The dreams clash
And are shattered ...
Pound, Canto CXVIII
The present aesthetic seems to be more and more cinematic. The best cinema is neither illustrative nor airily abstract, its dynamism lies in the spaces between the viewer and the viewed; neither is an actuality - cinema is a storm of discontinuities that sustains itself like our own memory. Memory is not the faculty of recollection, it is the membrane of diversities which serves as the correspondence between the phantoms of the past and the girth of reality, one already there, the other always to come, their meeting point is what we see. This is not a purely conceptual space. The cinematic attempts to marry the poles of conceptual and minimal art so that "what the artist really intended" emerges as ever more problematic.
Group exhibitions are often interesting on the basis of the way each aligns to the other: idiomatically, formally or whatever. The point of original intention in First Sight could occupy this whole discussion. All were in black and white, all declared their objecthood, all wanted to impart a new kind of life after the so-called "death of painting". Theatricality was the real tie.
Of the three, Nike Savvas' screens of checkered images were the most freely theatrical, in the Friedian sense of articulating their own domain of materiality prior to inviting the viewer to participate. But unlike the sacred minimal object it did invite the viewer to the point of devouring him/her; the wall left bare in between the checks was the viewer. The material images were oriented to each other, it wasn't a random dispersal, the