Space and perception
Diverse and complex spaces are mapped, traversed and transgressed in the group exhibition ‘Transitions: Space and Perception’. Part of Melbourne’s 2005 gay and lesbian Midsumma Festival visual arts program, ‘Transitions’ brings together the work of the queer identified Australian artists Marryanne Christodoulou, John and Stewart Construct, Tristan Jalleh, Marcus Keating, Natalie Kosnar, Jesus Manongdo, Freya Pinney and Yandell Walton. Although each of these artists focuses on certain kinds of spaces in their work, whether they are architectural, psychological, corporeal, public or private spaces, the discursive and formal boundaries that delimit these realms are made to disperse and fade in this exhibition.
The implications of John and Stewart Construct’s series of model houses with witty, mock-storybook titles exceed the limits of their miniature architectural spaces. The Constructs reproduce icons of the International Style, including Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, to offer a cutting critique of other universalising cultural forms and identities. The uniformity of this modernist aesthetic, often articulated at the expense of an appreciation for the cultural peculiarities of those who inhabit these building, is subverted by the Constructs who populate their tiny houses with an array of toy figures and animals. In The bears were having some difficulty adjusting to their new living arrangements. Status anxiety was a real issue (2004), two toy pandas ravage tiny dismembered male bodies. In their reference to bears, a gay subculture that does not subscribe to a cult of boyish beauty and pop fashion, the Constructs also allude to the loss of specificity associated with the word ‘queer’—an inclusive term that transcends categories of gender, sexuality and philosophy sometimes at the cost of an appreciation for