Double Take
9 - 23 December 2009
Preview: Tuesday 8 December, 5 - 7 pm
One is the loneliest number
A group show in December that features the multiple is hardly an unfamiliar concept. Less familiar however, is when the multiple nature of the multiple is highlighted, manipulated, and embraced. In their doubling, multiplicity and visual play, the works in Double Take become unfamiliar, even uncanny. Featuring a number of local and international artists from the gallery stable, the exhibition will include editions and series, works that explore the use of doppelganger, and pieces that invite a literal double take from the viewer in their play with the optical field.
For many of the artists in the exhibition, doubling and multiplicity is a key component of their practice. Artist Gregor Kregar embraces the use of the multiple within much of his practice, using it to transform his everyday subjects into something other. In his work in Double Take, around seventy ceramic pigs are arranged by color on the floor of the gallery. While one work is easily recognizable as an innocuous everyday object one imbued with the nostalgia of childhood memories, as a collective and a crowd, the pigs exude an entirely different sort of power.
Likewise, Cuban-born photographer Anthony Goicolea is well-known for his employment of the double, or rather, the doubling and replication of his own image, in his photography. This repetition of the self, the visualisation of a doppelganger, is uncanny, and introduces an eerie note to the works. Not only visually unexpected, catching a glimpse of one's own doppelganger also portends bad luck, danger, even death.
In a much more playful way, local artists such as Sara Hughes, James Cousins and David McCracken also interrogate the visual field. Sara Hughes explores the optics of colour and works such as Bubble and Burst seemingly shimmer under our gaze as concentric circles of colour play tricks with the eye. James Cousins uses imagery of the natural world as his source material, but such images are then weaved into and around a fractured optical field. David McCracken meanwhile, plays with the illusionistic, defying traditional associations of materials such as stainless steel.