The rarefied atmosphere of the Ferry and Crouch rooms of the Art Gallery of Ballarat have not been disturbed for well over a decade. On the walls, works by some of our best known colonial and Heidelberg artists – for the greatest part, men – hang, giving us a lesson in the power of the male gaze over the landscape, the city; over women, children and the Indigenous.
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Louiseann King’s new exhibition at the AGB, solis, is a deliberate challenge to that gaze. She’s immersed her own work among the prized oils, and reorganised them to construct a new narrative about the stories they tell, and about the gallery itself.
King and AGB curator Julie McLaren have spent months planning the exhibition, redefining the experience of walking through the two rooms of the gallery. Aside from King’s referential, elegiac works, a soundscape has been composed in collaboration with composer and sound artist Philip Samartzis, incorporating the noises of the bushland around King’s home in Eganstown.
“This soundscape takes us through a range of natural sound environments that were recorded in Victoria, and it will create an environment, or does create an environment I should say, where the viewer is a participant in a landscape that is both visual and acoustic,” King says.
King is known for her work in bronze – the most “monumental of mediums”, as she describes it – yet she takes the fleeting and ephemeral as her subjects to cast. Dead fauna and fine filigree crochet work is reproduced in the medium she’s chosen, distributed among glass cloches and wooden plinths which remind the viewer of Victorian laboratories and private museums.
King has taken the actual gallery building itself, with its statuesque dimensions and Victorian colours and timbres, and used it as an integral component of her work. She has aligned her installations to bring new vistas to established works; a view of a tree-laden Streeton landscape is framed through the skeletonized bronze twigs of a King sculpture, reminding the viewer that Streeton’s magnificent Heidelberg forest has long been laid to waste by white expansion and indifference.
“I've imagined these two spaces as being complementary spaces,” King says.
“The Crouch is about the exterior and so we're looking at landscape but looking outwards; and so the Crouch is fitted out with a large empty Victorian glass vitrine, and atop that vitrine is a construction made up of bronze casts of acacia and eucalypt branches in a kind of pseudo-scientific manner.”
solis runs at the Art Gallery of Ballarat as part of the Biennale of Australian Art (September 21 to November 6) from September 1 until April 7, 2019.
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