Relics
George Schwarz’s work is moving progressively towards three-edimensional assemblage and in this recent exhibition his characteristic photographic work sometimes seems like a kind of sub-plot to the major theme. A few of the ‘relics’ in this current show are photgraphic. Foor example there are a pair of small human skulls that lie side by side facing one another on crumpled blue textile, for all the world like two children engaged in pillow talk. There are at least two images of a wonderful old warehouse alongside the canal in Alexandria. This enourmous structure with the skeleton of its walls laid bare at one end went out of existence just a few days after its obituary photography was taken for this exhibition.
These photographs are mostly of sjy, pale slate-blue sky against which the relics are mounted; here rows of dry wish-bones, there an ibis skull or a smaller bird’s bony head pointing downwards with a short like of vertebral drums in a column above them. There is the carcass of skin of what was once a handsome lizard swimming across a moonstone coloured sky, looked at through a small brown marquetry frame.
A couple of the relics bring to mind the asphaltic texture of ancient embalming or bodies recovered from a bog. There is a immature chick resting peacefully in its tarry coating. In one more striking works an energetic soot-grey lorikeet plummets out of a golden sky like a Stuka dive-bomber. At “ground-level” we see photographic images of symmetrical building facades, low dunes or rock shelves by the cost, or the windshaped trees of Centennial Park captured in the brown to gold light that has been one of George Schwarz’s