Wendy Loefler 2017

WENDY LOEFLER Elsewhere 16 May - 4 June 2017

AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE

AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE

Invites you to the opening

WENDY LOEFLER Elsewhere

Tuesday 16 May 2017 6pm to 8pm 28 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066 Current until Sunday 4 June 2017 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm T 03 9417 2422 melbourne@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au wendyloefler.com.au Member Art Galleries Association of Australia

Overleaf and far right: Elsewhere (detail) 2015-17 charcoal and pastel on primed canvas 120 x 2600 cm Right: Last light 2015 charcoal and pastel on paper 132 x 102 cm

Elsewhere ‘Space, vast space, is the friend of being.’ Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964) ‘We all know that feeling, when we leave the city and our visual field is suddenly filled with sky, and the horizon of our vision retreats and finds a more remote place of rest. We might experience this when we go out to sea, drive across the flat lands of the outback or look down from a high summit. The arrival of capacious vision can have a dizzying effect. This can trigger a sense of inner displacement, a shudder of uncertainty about our place in the world. Wendy Loefler knows that such moments are the very stuff of art. As the philosopher Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, a book much loved by artists, ‘immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone’. While Bachelard inhabited the forest to contemplate the phenomenon of limitlessness in both a spatial and subjective sense, it is to the deserts of Australia that Wendy has returned again and again. Here one might look in one direction, knowing that the dunes rise and fall for nine hundred kilometres, but be unable to bring a perception of that terrestrial depth to consciousness. Such constraints upon our literal imagination are of course precisely the opposite for our poetic imagination, and it is in this space that Wendy dwells to make her work.

For years now Wendy Loefler has made works of ambitious scale that respond to arid environments. The exhibition Elsewhere is ambitious not only in scale, but in the scope of its composition as a single work that fills the gallery space. Here we have twelve linked canvases, tailored to the specific proportions of the gallery, comprising a 360-degree view. In the digital era, we are offered many screen-mediated opportunities to be immersed within environments both banal and fantastic: video games, virtual reality, digital art installations or in the cinema with our 3D glasses.

With Elsewhere Wendy returns stereoscopic vision to the virtuosity of the draftsperson and the most modest of mediums: charcoal. Impressions of light and depth, of the infinite and the indefinite that the viewer might experience, are the consequence of simple marks that through some intuitive skill only a few of us possess, distil a vision of place.

The raw white of primed canvas in Elsewhere provides ambiguous material for the spatial imagination. These passages might be sand, dunes, sky, stark light, heated atmospheres or voids that are kilometres deep. Contours are rendered with a soft touch. In some areas, the horizon line seems to be irrelevant. The overall effect is of diffuse saturation. What is vacuous in material terms provokes an amplified idea of space. But Wendy’s canvases also remind us that an apprehension of vastness also sensitizes the observer to what is close by. The sparse vegetation of the desert, while it cannot prevail over the horizontal plane, is nevertheless alive to the eye in its variety and crowds the foreground with detail in some canvases.

Wendy’s works are about the diminution of human scale by many orders of magnitude, the hunkering fortitude of the desert flora, the story of time told by the aged bones of a solitary tree. Beyond this, they are subtly emotional landscapes that probe elemental questions about the tenuousness of human and non-human life. Wendy seems to be telling us that it is in these arid places, places which resist becoming the dominion of humans, that such questions can be explored’.

Dr Laura Fisher – Arts Researcher February 2017