A preoccupation with unseen process, whether of labour or thought, traces through many of the works in ‘Here & Now 12’, an exhibition of early-career Western Australian artists at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Behold, a hint of my studio, my tools, my neurons as they synapse! The artists fashionably insist on a methodical process-as-art. They have kept their objects clean and pared-back, and they appear to feel extraordinarily constrained by, and attached to, that refined aesthetic. This is where the exhibition becomes interesting—the viewer can consider the question of whether we trust art that is so restrained that it evades any sort of confrontation.
Clare Peake’s black and white graphite images on archival paper all feature stark, circular black images, except one, which calls to mind the moist hanky of somebody with the Black Lung. A fine metallic mist is dispersed, as if by coughing, over the paper. Her glass and clay sculptures are in the centre of the room and the graphite drawings hang on each of the walls. We are told that the work takes the viewer from the conception of a thought through to its ultimate articulation. I feel as though the work was abandoned at the crucial instance. The procedural emphases betray the sense of restriction under which the artist is apparently working. The methodical mapping does not take the viewer beyond anal-retentiveness. Nor does it deal usefully with its own 1960s minimalist heritage.
The meticulous parquetry twig sculptures by Ben Kovacsy are an attempt to conceptually fuse the ‘contested territories’ of handcrafting processes with mechanical production, and this is achieved quite literally with an actual formal fusion of these two types of processes. The twigs