NEW HISTORIES
Blindside Gallery, Melbourne
2009
Editions by Clare Humphries
Systems of collecting and documentation are at the heart of Ria Green’s art
practice. In her daily passage from home to one place or the other, she is
driven by the possibility of another discovery; a roaming curator eager for her
next acquisition. Green’s studio (her bedroom, kitchen and lounge room), bears
witness to these travels and reveals her to be the custodian of a strange array
of oddments: heirloom cups-and-saucers, crystal brooches, discarded bread-ties,
embroidered handkerchiefs, used ribbons, broken tiles and neat stacks of
post-cards.
In her self-appointed role as ‘archivist / curator / historian’, Green
transforms her collected treasures through the perceptual apparatus of the
artist. Colour, pattern and form are the organising principles through which she
searches for connections between the not-too-distant past and the
soon-to-be-distant present.
In New Histories we seethe latest acquisitions in Green’s museum of
everyday life. She has salvaged framed reproductions of paintings from
second-hand stores and road-side collections. A hand-made embroidery also
appears, as if to call attention to the ‘authenticity’ of a collection otherwise
characterised by duplicates. Together these once desired objects are transformed
into cultural specimens and analysed according to a framework of primary and
secondary colours.
Each artefact in New Histories has been distilled into a set of
constituent colours, creating a visual hypothesis of the palette used to
construct the image. These hues, and their respective concentrations, are
translated into tinted sand, documented and sealed in scientific jars. Rows of
glassy vessels are neatly placed in proximity to their corresponding image, as
if to cement their connections, or perhaps the artist is reassuring herself of
the links between the past and the present. Then again, it may be an invitation
to viewers to engage in their own perceptual evaluation, to verify whether
Green’s speculative representation matches their own analysis.
Green’s process of documentation has created new trajectories for the
discarded images that once lived (we imagine) in the kitsch lounge-rooms of
Melbourne’s suburbs. Their presence today, on the white walls of a gallery, does
not seem to ‘elevate’ them to fine art status, or even prompt us to question the
tension between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ despite the inclusion of embroidery.
Instead, it renders them artefacts of time, subject to the eyes of the
‘artist-as-archaeologist’ in a search to understand something about the past, or
perhaps the present.
Whilst the ‘found’ images in New Histories might signify earlier
times, Green’s works do not attempt to ‘recover’ the past through imitation or
reproduction. Instead, there is a recognition that memory does not repeat what
has occurred, but constructs and transforms. The colour samples of each artefact
do not mimic, but re-imagine. We see the distortions and re-transcriptions of
memory in action.
New Histories reminds us that memory also involves forgetting; that
in the process of archiving, things are discarded and lost. A collection of
vessels that stand without a print or embroidery to interpret them, leave one
wondering what has transpired. Has a picture been misplaced, or is this evidence
of rejected experiments, a sign of the artists’ process of material thinking?
Whatever these orphan bottles designate, they endure like souvenirs of a distant
past. An indication of the longing to capture something that remains forever
elusive.
Clare Humphries
May 2009
practice. In her daily passage from home to one place or the other, she is
driven by the possibility of another discovery; a roaming curator eager for her
next acquisition. Green’s studio (her bedroom, kitchen and lounge room), bears
witness to these travels and reveals her to be the custodian of a strange array
of oddments: heirloom cups-and-saucers, crystal brooches, discarded bread-ties,
embroidered handkerchiefs, used ribbons, broken tiles and neat stacks of
post-cards.
In her self-appointed role as ‘archivist / curator / historian’, Green
transforms her collected treasures through the perceptual apparatus of the
artist. Colour, pattern and form are the organising principles through which she
searches for connections between the not-too-distant past and the
soon-to-be-distant present.
In New Histories we seethe latest acquisitions in Green’s museum of
everyday life. She has salvaged framed reproductions of paintings from
second-hand stores and road-side collections. A hand-made embroidery also
appears, as if to call attention to the ‘authenticity’ of a collection otherwise
characterised by duplicates. Together these once desired objects are transformed
into cultural specimens and analysed according to a framework of primary and
secondary colours.
Each artefact in New Histories has been distilled into a set of
constituent colours, creating a visual hypothesis of the palette used to
construct the image. These hues, and their respective concentrations, are
translated into tinted sand, documented and sealed in scientific jars. Rows of
glassy vessels are neatly placed in proximity to their corresponding image, as
if to cement their connections, or perhaps the artist is reassuring herself of
the links between the past and the present. Then again, it may be an invitation
to viewers to engage in their own perceptual evaluation, to verify whether
Green’s speculative representation matches their own analysis.
Green’s process of documentation has created new trajectories for the
discarded images that once lived (we imagine) in the kitsch lounge-rooms of
Melbourne’s suburbs. Their presence today, on the white walls of a gallery, does
not seem to ‘elevate’ them to fine art status, or even prompt us to question the
tension between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ despite the inclusion of embroidery.
Instead, it renders them artefacts of time, subject to the eyes of the
‘artist-as-archaeologist’ in a search to understand something about the past, or
perhaps the present.
Whilst the ‘found’ images in New Histories might signify earlier
times, Green’s works do not attempt to ‘recover’ the past through imitation or
reproduction. Instead, there is a recognition that memory does not repeat what
has occurred, but constructs and transforms. The colour samples of each artefact
do not mimic, but re-imagine. We see the distortions and re-transcriptions of
memory in action.
New Histories reminds us that memory also involves forgetting; that
in the process of archiving, things are discarded and lost. A collection of
vessels that stand without a print or embroidery to interpret them, leave one
wondering what has transpired. Has a picture been misplaced, or is this evidence
of rejected experiments, a sign of the artists’ process of material thinking?
Whatever these orphan bottles designate, they endure like souvenirs of a distant
past. An indication of the longing to capture something that remains forever
elusive.
Clare Humphries
May 2009
