As another year rolls through the Cultural Precinct at the University of Western Australia, the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery is once again host to its annual HERE&NOW exhibition series. Conceived as a showcase of local West Australian art within a defined area of practice, this year’s ‘HERE&NOW15’ focuses on the expanding material and non-material parameters of contemporary sculpture. Curator Andrew Purvis has selected new works by eight Western Australia based artists, including Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Rebecca Baumann, David Brophy, Jacobus Capone, Loren Kronemyer, Tanya Lee, Shannon Lyons and Alistair Rowe.
Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Purvis cites American art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ as his theoretical point of departure. Krauss considers the distinct category of sculpture during a period where radical artistic gestures, in the spirit of institutional critique, cemented their place as the contemporary avant-garde in the United States. Informed by movements such as Land Art, Krauss concedes that the tendency of sculpture to freely defy formal categories of representation and medium may, in the future, prove to be far more elastic and expansive than she and her contemporaries can predict. ‘HERE&NOW15’ seeks to ‘expand the expanded field’,1 in the words of the curator, and to capture a localised snapshot of artists who are well within their means to declare themselves sculptors, whatever that designation now means.
As one enters the exhibition, Rebecca Baumann’s Light Event appropriates the gallery’s automatic sliding doors. Coating the glass doorway with dichroic film and strategically positioned spotlights, Baumann offsets the pedestrian entrance into a simultaneous moving display of translucent colour and reflective surface. I hesitate to term the work an event, or interventionist, as does