15 May 2006
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| Siri Hayes,'Crossing the Merri, 2003' |
The Switchback Gallery, at Monash's Gippsland campus, becomes home this week to a new exhibition of works that evoke the aspirations of the late 19th century symbolists.
Reverie features works from the Monash University Collection by artists who sought to capture the elusive notions of moods, emotions and ideas through their works.
Images of nature, figures and cityscapes became vehicles to express the artists' inner worlds.
Exhibition curator Ms Kirrily Hammond said the artworks shared an ambiguity of form and meaning that relied on the viewer's intuition to interpret them, "seducing them into their own states of reverie".
Among the works is Rosslynd Piggott's Upside-down landscape (1989), a surreal, upturned vision of Tuscan countryside that, in the artist's own words, is drawn from the inner world of the imagination and evokes a stillness and tranquility.
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| Rosslynd Piggott,'Upside-down landscape,1989' |
Contrasting this is Siri Hayes' urban landscape series of large-format photographs, Lyric Theatre, which suggests an element of the sublime amid inner city detritus, as miniature protagonists enact a play on the banks of Merri Creek.
The enigmatic, deliberately blurred photographs of Graeme Hare feature in the exhibition as do the scratched and overwrought surfaces of Peter Graham's abstract work on paper.
Ms Hammond said every work in the exhibition inhabited a place somewhere between reality and fiction, consciousness and memory.
"Just as the symbolists valued above all the importance of individual experience and expression...these works encourage viewers to bring their own experiences and feelings to the fore and respond in a very intimate way," she said.
What:
Reverie exhibition
Where: Switchback Gallery, Monash University Gippsland Campus, Churchill, Vic.
When: Tuesday May 16 until Thursday June 22. Mon-Fri, 9am to 5pm
Curator Kirrily Hammond will speak before the opening of the exhibition at 4pm, Tuesday May 16.
For more information contact Melissa Marino, Media Communications, on + 61 3 9905 2085 or 0437 121 978. Pictures of the artworks are available.
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