The venue/context of this exhibition is significant: a dealer gallery in a remote regional city backed by local business people who are also arts activists, a dealer gallery with a considered approach to its regional situation and a sustained commitment to showing contemporary work. The Gallery 25 program is a mix of local and visiting artists’ work. Visiting artists most often have links with the area through their work or family and friends. It is not surprising then to find recurrent explorations and ideas appearing throughout the program. The semi-arid Mallee landscape, the brave folly of irrigating and farming the desert and the wild places beyond are among the abiding themes which engage numbers of artists. This exhibition by Pamela Kouwenhoven and John Hayward is no exception.
Adelaide, not Melbourne is Mildura’s closest capital city and both artists travelled the long straight stretches of road from the South for this exhibition. For several years now Pamela Kouwenhoven has been making work using malthoid, a tarry fibrous material once commonly used as a moisture resistant membrane. The artist scavenges for weathered malthoid found beneath rusted-out iron water tanks. The surfaces revealed are richly patinated, made up of sombre colours ranging from coal-black through to silver-grey over which rich rusty ochres bloom and seep. Kouwenhoven selects the most evocative sections, often with an embossed line or band bisecting the surface to suggest a horizon line or a physical division. A white mat and a simple black frame isolates and magnifies the resulting glimpses of the infinite, geological time, or a bleakly beautiful post-apocalyptic landscape. For several works in this exhibition the artist has removed and replaced a geometrically regular section of the