MIRA GOJAK
Project Room, Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building
31 July -- 6 August 2006
Newly commissioned installation of sculpture and drawing by one of Australia's most interesting contemporary artists. Presented as part of the Melbourne Art Fair's International project room program.
MIRA GOJAK
TOO NEAR -- TOO FAR
Installation view; Mira Gojak, Nothing Before Nothing After, Melbourne Art Fair 2006, Monash University Museum of Art, 2006 |
A black line on white paper exposes the passage of the artist's hand through time and space, travelling over the paper's surface and over previous layers and marks. Whatever its physical size, the paper is a vastness, a desert or cosmos of open potentiality which each stroke might either describe, or collapse. In drawing, the artist must negotiate a stream of choices impacting upon how the space between representation and abstraction is navigated, a space between decision and doubt, absence and presence.
In Mira Gojak's series of drawings Something has to go, 1-4 2006 we are able to peer into the process of creation both in micro and in macro. Gojak's unfolding line offers us a kind of Ariadne's thread through the labyrinthine space of drawing and the process of creation. Creation, the game of the gods, unfolds with celestial energy, and yet there are also very human moments of doubt and circling indecision.
At times, these lyrical works offer passages of soaring exhilaration; other movements are black, tempestuous and intensely overlaid. Gojak's line curves and sweeps and shudders, we sense moments of near abandon as well as places of retreat and frustration, a condensed expression of emotion. These drawings describe an infinity of movements in space, time, and possibility. We read these lines with our imagination: perhaps recognising the path of a bee or bird, swirling eddies of air or water, the experience of music, or a tumbling passage of narrative.
The subconscious, is a wellspring from which these works draw both their energy and unease. Like the Surrealists, Gojak has evolved a personal vernacular of automatism, her own methods of loosening the control of the mind over the hand, a fragile balance between obedience and disobedience, knowing and surprising. These drawings then, are a kind of playing field for the connection between the mind and body, a dance of near and far.
In Gojak's overlaid web of arching to-and-fro lines there are multiple spatial propositions at play, just as one system of logic is constructed, it collapses, collides or colludes with another. Our eyes climb wishbone ladders and tread meandering paths into deep space, a vigorous surface line holds our gaze in diminishing patterns of infinite regression -- and then, suddenly, we are sprawling on the surface again, a thick blackness supporting us over an emptiness of white.
Entropy and growth, movement and evolution, the body and the natural world are recurrent subjects in Gojak's practice. Gojak works with everyday materials, such as furniture, wax, wire and light bulbs. She is known for her sculptural installations of cut furniture, such as Silence 2005, which featured in ACCA's NEW05 and is now held in the Monash University Collection. Here a series of mass produced domestic chairs are carved into fine contours which uncoil from each other, a series of rhizome-like skeletons -- in which the manufactured returns to the body, and the structure beneath the body is unravelled, revealing an uncanny sympathy of form.
Installation view; Mira Gojak, Nothing Before Nothing After, Melbourne Art Fair 2006, Monash University Museum of Art, 2006
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Together with her ambitious new series of drawings Something has to go, 1-4, Gojak has created a new sculptural commission for Monash University Museum of Art's Melbourne Art Fair project room exhibition, Too near - too far. Impasse 2006 takes the same model of plastic chair as used in the work Silence, and this time slices and arranges the chairs in a claustrophobic conjunction of parts: a sequence of joints or shoulders abut each other and are confined within a rectangular depth of felt.
Like Gojak's drawings Impasse plays with scale and shifts between the distant and the intimate. This sculptural installation is at once a still life, a mountainous landscape and a study of the body. We recognise a reptilian progression of interlocking parts in the sequences of manufactured surfaces. The gleaming black curves of the plastic chairs are cut to tightly interlock, front to front, back to back, cheek to jowl. These darkly sensual surfaces echo the collision fetish linking car and disaster in David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash.
Against the hard gleaming blackness of these dismembered and re-articulated chairs, layers of blue-grey felt rise and draw close. They form an insistent geometry of containment, a liquid solid cut to flow into the curves and edges of the scaled progression of chair-parts. These blanketing layers envelop the progression of black plastic forms, and yet are also punctured by the smooth difference of their hard surface. Gojak cuts mirrored ends to fit the dark curves of the disjointed chair bodies. Whilst felt and plastic are set in tension with each other, the mirrors open an unlikely space back into the world, a kind of trap door, or escape route, a path which also reaches out to absorb the viewer back into the work.
Biography
Mira Gojak lives and works in Melbourne. She was born in 1963 and studied Science, Psychology and Zoology at the University of Adelaide, before completing a BA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1992.
Gojak's recently individual exhibitions include: Time and Time Again, CLUBS Project Inc. 2005; Stranded , Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 2004; Wax me to the vapour and dusk, sometimes, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, 2002; and Sorrow is no friend of mine, First Floor, 2002. In 2005 Gojak featured in a number of group exhibitions including Fellow Anthropoid, Contemporary Art Services Tasmania; Pitch Your Own Tent: Art Projects |Store 5 | 1st Floor, Monash University Museum of Art; and NEW05, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2005 Gojak was awarded the inaugural Maddock's Art Prize. |
