What
Tina Eats For Breakfast
SFA Gallery (Ilam) April, 2009.
Scott Flanagan,
Miranda Parkes, Dan Arps, Rob Hood, Justin Kerr, Nathan Pohio and Erica van
Zon.
Scott Flanagan showed a series of collages
composed from source material drawn from 1970s woman fashion magazines.
Focusing specifically on cosmetic imagery, Flanagan’s work turned around themes
of nostalgia, image, stereotypes and beauty. Miranda Parkes showed a video piece
entitled Gloucester St Window, which
showed a billowing piece of fabric stretch taught across an empty window frame.
Like the majority of Parkes’ video work, it was a study formal composition,
picking out an anomalous moment from everyday routine to speculate on aesthetic
devices. Justin Kerr, showed three works, an
operating typewriter which automatically printed a manifesto by Bob Kaufman, a
free standing work bench and a bucket of snow globes. Mimicking set design, Kerr’s piece worked
around a theatrical and comedic conceit, introducing new themes of mortality
and showmanship to his practice. Nathan Pohio showed two photographs. Each
showed the same horse in mid-motion whilst grazing. Hung adjacent to each
other, the photograph’s act as a study in narrative convention, working as a
contextual study that sits within the context of his more popular film and
video work. Dan Arps showed a video work loosely
gelling around new-age paranormal cults.
Beginning with a plaintive plea by an estranged sibling for the subject
to ‘return to his medication’ the video, then uses sourced animation and how-to
voice-over documentaries to gestate on the para-body passage of “multi-dimensional
beings’. Rob Hood showed a video work of UFO house
on the back of a transport truck. With its lights in full passage, and the hum
of worker and maintenance activity about it, the video showed a moment of
orchestration, imbibing that comedic hue of infamously fabricated UFO
sightings. Erica van Zon exhibited six hand woven
rugs. Shaped primarily around
abstraction van Zon’s rugs come off as the domesticated forms of modernism’s
purifying impulse. Reflecting a rubric of sentimental minimalism, a tendency to
value and deploy emotion, these rugs brought into relief an aspect of van Zon’s
practice that is rarely seen in isolation.
