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Each year the Performance Space in Sydney organises a group show of works by relatively unknown artists. Such exhibitions present curators with a difficult task. To produce a show of sufficiently broad scope to include disparate art practices without sacrificing overall coherence and so the readability of each work. This year's curator of Untitled '91 , Billy Crawford, has tackled this dilemma with sensitivity and cunning. Formal, thematic, even political continuities exist throughout the exhibition rendering it navigable, without overwhelming the autonomy of each artist's project. In this respect Rod Jacka's installation These Are The Words But They Don't Make A Song, is a curiously apt title for the viewer's first encounter upon entering the gallery space.
Jacka's installation deals with three distinct temporal systems or cultures; the digital electronic, the clockwork universe and the biological cycle. The simplicity with which Jacka evinces the conflicting interaction of these· different cultural orders is rare. A log on the floor onto which mechanically regulated red resin drops whilst a digital counter randomly 'counts' the number of drips. The violence that actually results from such interactions as in the killing of forests by the logging industry is evoked by the scabrous wound of resin that accumulates on the body of the fresh log.
Kassandra Bossell 's Bring on the Dancing Girls – Macrochip Female #2, also deals with cultural interpenetration but this time the biological is gendered, whose cultural 'other' is computer technology. Here, water etches tessellations (like computer circuits) into a large sheet of suspended steel covered with blobs of tree sap. Beneath this a trough is being formed again by the water in a strip of paraffin wax on