Vanity, installation
view, 1997

The eccentric phenomenological sensuality of Minimalism and popular psychotherapy combined with Pop's phenomenological emptiness to form a particular mode of historical vanity. The exhibition, VANITY, expresses a nostalgia for this historical vanity. As much as the works rhetorically referred to the sixties, they stylistically referred to the early eighties, affecting a cute, if fragile, retrospective of contemporary art as style.

Eve Sullivan's I'm going through a rose period is a series of large glossy cibachrome prints pinned directly to the wall. In these prints hot pink and soft pink front covers from magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Australian Women's Forum were photographed dreamily out of focus. Like DeKooning's 'women', Warhol's Jackie Kennedy's and more recently Sylvie Fleurie's fake fur paintings and magazine covers I'm going through a rose period neatly floated between a sensualist's dream and a media junkie's nightmare.

Susan Norrie's Labouring in vain is the most successful work in the show. A long low black box was cantilevered from the large centre wall of the gallery, a small glass panel set in its top revealed strings of black glass rosary beads. To the box's right, attached to the wall by a small cantilevered 'plinth-shelf', another large black box formed the base for a discrete frame. This frame bounded two sheets of glass between which hung more parallel strings of rosary beads.

Labouring in vain has much in common with the stylised materiality of Don Judd's minimalist boxes. While Judd and Norrie both appear to share a fascination with the ability of contemporary materials to open onto ecstatic experience, Norrie's work is more candid in its poetic conceits. The 'screen' of rosary beads resembles nothing so much as a confessional grill. The rosary's well-thumbed oily droplets testify to Norrie's ability to evoke the fantastically fluid spaces of oil paint in the most readymade forms.

Looking like the bounty from a midnight raid on the local thrift store Anne Louise Rowe's In perpetuam rei memoriam consisted of two large shop facade mirrors lent against the wall. These mirrors created an illusion whereby if you stood two metres in front, exactly aligned with them, your reflection disappeared. The lower half of the mirrors were scratched into from behind with an illegible cursive script signifying 'Goth'. Alongside these mirrors, squat atop a regulation matt-black plinth, sat the top third of a human skull, latch-bolts attached as one might find on an anatomical specimen.

While Rowe evoked a precarious threshold between line and text in the scrawled handwriting, mirrored surfaces and knitted intercise of skull bones, the work was hampered by a lack of attention to detail. The architectural, readymade, Goth, and vanitas inspired stylistics evoked but never congealed into the complex material poetic the work promised.

The potential of individual works in VANITY suffered from an unfocussed hang - the gallery was half empty - though vanity may have had it half full. The works didn't buoy each other up as they might have but chose to chat it out individually with the recently renovated gallery space which is itself a demandingly articulate conversant.

Shane Breynard
May, 1997

Photos: S Breynard
© The artists and
Courtesy of CCAS

Eve Sullivan, I'm going through
a rose period, 1997

Susan Norrie,
Labouring in vain,
1997

Anne Louise Rose,
In perpetuam rei
memoriam, 1997