so many things can happen in one minute (work in progress)
I heard Nathalie de Briey's exhibition long before I entered the gallery. Long drawn out wails followed by violent fits of coughing echoed around the gargantuan halls of the Tasmanian School of Art like the death gurgles of an irritable banshee. As the entrance to the gallery came into sight, I noticed a group of visitors clustered nervously around the safety of the catalogue stand, urgently gesturing to their lingering friends to hastily follow them to the exit. Regardless of the strained expressions of the others, my curiosity was sparked as I realised that although it was painfully swelling to a crescendo, the strangulated yodelling was interspersed with shouts of Yes! Yes!, No! No! I had to see the source of the shrill trumpeting for myself.
'So many things can happen in one minute' was not as visually hostile as it was tonally so. The culmination of a three month residency at the Tasmanian School of Art and part of the Scottish Arts Council's Resident in Australia program, Belgian-born de Briey presented a show both delicately whimsical and gratingly coarse. Lacing the themes of time, space and movement into four works of relatively equal impact, 'So many things can happen in one minute' was a satisfying glimpse into a promising work in progress.
In the centre of the sparse, grey carpeted gallery were two large projection screens. On one side of Moment, 2001, a rumpled white kite zoomed around a fathomless blue sky while on the other a youthful couple 'not yet aware of those outside {their) sphere of grace'1 glided effortlessly across the floor of an empty suburban ballroom. The luscious red of the woman's billowing skirt flashed in