Ross Wolfe
This exhibition initially confounded any easy, reflexive reading. It was composed of works by the artist, Ross Wolfe, and works from the Flinders University collection (selected by Wolfe doubling as curator). The Flinders works were diverse and bore no obvious, immediate relationship to each other. They included a c.1600 engraving of a martyrdom by Hendrik Goltzius, a mid 19th century lithograph of a landscape by Nicholas Chevalier, an early 19th century engraving from the Disasters of War series by Francisco Goya, and a number of 1990s acrylics by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Dispersed within this company was the work of Ross Wolfe. Some of Wolfe’s works were paintings—small panels in the main—within which figures or figurative forms, and sometimes landscape motifs could be discerned. A bank of TV monitor-like images, The Mystery of Forgetting, captured the death throes of strickened ships, contributing a powerful set of metaphors for a collective memory loss of insights and values that, as essayist Wendy Walker states, have become ‘diminished and compromised in contemporary life’. A set of works, The reality of Hell as a place of everlasting punishment, featured Warhol-like newsprint-derived images of assorted violence and misery.
This entire exhibition, with its seeming lack of centre and its many competing voices, challenged the viewer to find sufficient scaffolding to make sense of the project. If, in the viewing process, the artist’s small hermit-like figures had been discovered, some insight should have emerged. Wolfe’s hermits, or holy men, acted as tangible reminders of an alternative world view and pathway for living. One photograph in the exhibition, showing a Sadhu or ‘holy man’, was taken by Wolfe when travelling in India in 1969. The hermit figure