Shadow Palette exhibition essay Alex Karaconji / Shannon Smith / Laura Sutton / Lisa Pang / Simon W heeldon Exhibition at Stacks Projects 5 – 22 M arch 2020 In recent times and as we prepared for this exhibition, this city was a smokescape. With the world turned ashen and drained of colour, the usually unremarkable aspects of everyday life became charged. Living in the thickness of an unnatural natural event was an intense sensate experience. Distanced just enough from the immediate risk of bushfire, we were nonetheless shrouded in its effects and empathetic. General conversations tended towards overt politicisation and polarisation of views. It was as if the acute bodily physicality of being in such times, those greyed days of monochrome, made us aware of forms and values more keenly. Within the prescient burntsmelling haze, paradoxically, some things were clearer than ever. As a group of artists working to a curation by Shannon Smith, we had similarly subdued parameters within which to make works for this specific space. For a start, colour was abandoned in favour of other form-finding strategies. Tone, texture, weight. Materials and materiality. Structure, technique, content. These attributes seemed to increase in significance. Another aim, to dramatize the relationship between our works and their exhibition environment, had us picturing the gallery space in our minds as we worked: that grey-green and white cube on an inner city street.
Shadow Palette exhibition installed at Stacks Projects
What is it that happens to visual experience when colour fades, and drama enters? The works of Shadow Palette suggest that perhaps, it is like wandering through a city late at night, close to a dream. In such a state, one observes the city’s details at a remove, but in shattering detail, and occasionally embellished.