FRONT: Sister Wives When Wishing Still Worked 2012
INSIDE FAR LEFT: Shellaine Godbold Sugar Rose 2012
INSIDE LEFT: Tiffany Cole Spoon 2012
INSIDE RIGHT: Helen Braund Wolf 2012
OVERLEAF: Roh Singh Final Words 2012
ABOVE: Matthew Day Perez Grow 2010
SISTER WIVES - When Wishing Still Worked ROH SINGH - Tell them I said something... MATTHEW DAY PEREZ - Grow
SISTER WIVES - When Wishing Still Worked ROH SINGH - Tell them I said something... MATTHEW DAY PEREZ - Grow
SISTER WIVES - When Wishing Still Worked
Disney has a lot to answer for. Fairy tales used to be truly disturbing – just Google the Grimm brothers’ or Hans Christian Anderson’s stories and you’ll get the idea – but in a way ‘happily ever after’ is even worse. Generations have grown up with expectations that often go unfulfilled. Sister Wives ask what happens if you don’t get your happily ever after, and what is ‘happy ever after’ anyway?
Sister Wives is a collective featuring Helen Braund, Tiffany Cole and Shellaine Godbold. For When Wishing Still Worked, they have created an enchanted forest of their own, complete with a humble forest dwelling. The woods of fairy tale stories are expansive and intoxicating, enticing innocent people to become lost and vulnerable to the dangerous characters within. The loveliness of Sister Wives work, with its fine details and delicate colour, similarly lures you in.
Shellaine Godbold makes drawings and objects that explore women’s roles in fairy tales. Carefully crafted teeth and bones are wicked witches’ trophies; embroidered ladies reference a fictional wife (perhaps with stories of her own to tell) who patiently embroiders while waiting for her husband to return home from the forest; and finely drawn locks are those of mythical princesses who are only known for their hair.
Tiffany Cole makes delightfully deceptive paintings. You will meet life-sized swans in the forest, but they won’t bite. The paintings are blown-up representations of porcelain collectable swans. Cole also paints timeless domestic objects on doilies, so life-like and inviting you would be forgiven for reaching to pick them up. Perhaps they are magic objects? But they, like the idea of ‘happy ever after’ are mere illusion.
Helen Braund’s photographs cast the three Sister Wives in the roles of fairy tale characters. The photographs, hung inside the forest cabin, are in the style of old daguerreotypes, suggesting that these characters live here in the cabin, but are
perhaps from a time and place when wishing still worked. Braund also presents us with a fairy tale feast on a table outside in the forest. But this food is not to eat! Food in fairy tales is less about nourishment, and more about deception and magic spells, spectacle and desire.
Sister Wives have created a magical world of their own, but like the fairy tales it is inspired by it is deceptive and perhaps dangerous- make sure you leave yourself a trail of crumbs.
Annika Harding, April 2012
ROH SINGH - Tell them I said something...
Famous last words. They can be remarkably poignant, such as the executed bushranger Ned Kelly’s ‘Such is life’ or 19th century US President John Quincy Adams’ “This is the last of Earth! I am content!”. Or they can be utterly anticlimactic, like Winston Churchill’s “I’m so bored with it all.”, or those of Mexican revolutionary Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, who upon being assassinated was quoted as pleading “don’t let it end like this; tell them I said something.”
Roh Singh has taken these final utterings and literally turned them into solid, sculptural forms. His work explores the conundrums of representing intangible and ephemeral things as sculpture. As Singh explains, “Sound struggles to be something measurable as a physical element.”
Singh has created these sculptures by recording last words as sound bytes, and then producing computer visuals like the kind that you see in music software. The peaks and troughs of the soundwaves are then used to inform a computer-aided design (CAD) wood-turning machine. Technology provides the means to reinterpret this virtual data into solid 3D form.
The result is, despite its technological nature, quite nostalgic. The wood-turning effect is familiar and decorative, like so much ordinary furniture, but the heightened and oc-
casionally sharp peaks and valleys are over the top and emotive, almost baroque.
Adding to this, some of these sculptures have been gilded. This is no ordinary turned wood, but something of great value and importance. Last words are imbued with special significance, even when they are not meant as last words; even when they are disappointingly ordinary. The gold also alludes to the celebrity with which these words are imbued, and indeed their famous (and infamous) speakers. Singh appropriates final words from artists, performers and historical figures.
Sculptures can be dumb objects, but Singh’s have their own voices, and they will have the last word.
Annika Harding, April 2012
Roh Singh would like to acknowledge and thank Luke Ommundson and the team at Evostyle for their support and assistance with this project.
MATTHEW DAY PEREZ - Grow
Matthew Day Perez’s newest installation asks the viewer to consider where glass comes from. Does it inexplicably spring to life? Grow from a river of molten material? How is it made? Exploiting craft and a general unknowingness, Grow employs traditional glass making techniques and mixed media to mediate the relationship between utilitarian glass objects utilized everyday, and the process employed to make them.
Grow consists of two components. In one corner of the installation a video projection depicts a molten landscape, a garden of glowing material. At various moments within the video loop, glass vessels and vases inexplicably grow, just as a flower blooms, or a blade of grass thrusts upward through a mound of dirt; pitchers, cups, mugs, and wine glasses mature and are plucked from a glowing plot of soil. Opposite the video, situated in the center of the room, a glowing chamber houses a crucible of molten glass. The electric kiln is outfitted with a clear quartz lid allowing the viewer to witness the elements flicker on and off supplying the energy necessary to maintain a liquid consistency. This unit is a green house, an incubator, a nursery of sorts from which the molten material is transformed into useful and pragmatic objects depicted within the video.
The coalescing of these two components proposes a suspicious and slightly misleading scenario where glass is not manufactured in the most conventional sense but is generated or ‘grown’. It begs the viewer to slow down and ponder where things, products, and in this instance glass, comes from.
Matthew Day Perez, March 2012
Matthew Day Perez would like to thank the ANU School of Art Glass Workshop. This installation has beenmadepossiblethroughthegenerousdonationbyParagonIndustries.