Things That Look Like Rocks
Peter Nelson’s recent exhibition at Sydney’s Gallery 9, curiously titled Things That Look Like Rocks, could with equal verisimilitude also have been called: Things That Look Like Digital Prints, Things That Look a Bit Like Clouds, possibly even Things That Look a Lot Like Literati Landscapes. The polyptychs, all ink on paper, are contextualized by a short, unattributed essay that concludes with a paragraph establishing that they are a night time countervail to the prodigious amount of time the artist spends on his computer during the day. The cleft this opens up between employment and its opposite, has, with regard to these images, the curious consequence of exalting labour above capital. In the process, it unravels the accepted categorisation of the artist’s hand as merely instrumental by re-theorising repetitive, materially valueless exertion as a thinking through of things. That making, as a form of cognition, is a conceptual not physical act; something special, even priceless. If these were text, they would be poetry not prose.
Art often tells us about the world by incidentally telling us something about the artist. The small scale of these pieces is proof of the constricted space within which Nelson works; a dormitory in Hong Kong where he is studying for a PhD. Their dimensions allow for either postage or for him to continue to develop and refine them as he travels. They tell of his mobility and disclose a professional if not personal itinerancy, an increasing reality for many contemporary artists. Furthermore, they attest to his ongoing, respectful investigation into classical Chinese art. Visually, they acknowledge the primacy of game-based graphics and post-internet studio methodologies within an emerging, geographically decentred art world