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The first thing one noticed in John Wailer's Random Access, a survey of Brisbane artists using photocopiers and computers, was its impeccable use of gallery space. Each work appeared as a mini-installation, enjoying maximum clarity and isolation.
As exhibition curator, Wailer notes the exhibits here can be broadly categorised as both explorations of the new cybernetic and photographic media, and as predominantly 'Brisbane' artifacts, defined by their creators' co-presence - or recent co-presence - in Expo City. Significantly, Wailer adds a third category to these considerations, noting that these works all also tend to reach 'beyond the technical into social and spiritual dimensions'.
This factor becomes particularly evident in Wailer 's own assemblage of photocopied and photo-mutated images in his epic Study for an untitled landscape (1988). Stepping to and fro before this vast, mural-like composition, one glimpses horizons, tress, sentences, words and hieroglyphics in a complex web of images and inscriptions drawn from such sources as historical accounts of explorations, and photographs taken by Wailer's father.
Exploring even more personal iconography, Jane Richens' portraits and self-portraits offer mysterious, slightly out-of-focus glimpses of her subjects, generating an impact somewhat akin to that of early photographs, as flowers and facial features loom onto adjacent planes. Richens' huge working study for PORTRAIT OF B.D. (1989), typifies her capacity to register deeply moving stasis and monumentality.
Hiram To's Still Life in Mobile Homes (1989) characteristically combines a sense of cool surface with amusingly irrelevant domestic detail, within a lattice-like structure made up of twenty wooden panels. To's use of laminated laser copy on galvanised iron wittily juxtaposed 'soft-edge', slightly blurred imagery with metallic, 'hard-edge' surface, and organic wooden 'frames'.
David Moses'