Worlds in a Tangle

WHERE: At The Vanishing Point Gallery.  565 King st. Newtown.

OPENING: 6pm Jan 7, 2010

 Four Sydney artists explore the powerful forces at play in the imagination of children, examining our capacity to generate “worlds” out of the inchoate, fragmented, and often hostile confusion of experience we encounter in the process of growing up.  Like a secular “Songs of Innocence”, these works present and explore the child’s imaginary means of grappling with the dark matter of life; what grown-ups like to call reality, but which children have no name for. Instead they absorb and integrate its menace into the often graceful, comforting, and playful imaginary that is their single defence against the encroachments of The World.

All four artists explore this common theme through very different means and towards different ends.  Fiona Fenech uses drawing and montage to question the myth of innocence, and tease out the interventions that adults make into the child’s imaginary world; while Isabel Watts evokes the pure synthetic process of child’s play by drawing together the disparate and heterogeneous material of modern experience into a single organic form, combining televisions with swans and desk lamps with candlesticks.  Nana Sakata draws a nebulous menagerie of unlikely characters from an improbable children’s book, evoking its possibility and suggesting the limitlessness of an imagination prior to the learning of limits.  Stephanie Bray on the other hand, uses sculptural installation to invoke the veil of memory and examine the way in which we each possess our own childhood, changed and at a distance that allows us to polish out the hard edges. 

www.atthevanishingpoint.com.au