Until June 3rd, Sydney gallery Home@735 presents a thought-provoking exhibition which pulls together five artists to explore common threads. I had the pleasure of writing the exhibition text in response to the show.

Visit the show at:
735 Bourke Street | Redfern

Here is an excerpt:

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Liminal spaces and shifting states of being trace moments of mediation, transition and absorption throughout Home@735’s exhibition 09.05.18. Assembled together, each of the five artists’ works emanate impressions of presence and absence.

Janet Haslett’s series Cy in the Centre offers a familiar rumination on this theme. Visitors to last year’s Cy Twombly retrospective at the Pompidou form her subjects, as she paints the process of looking. Almost all see the Paris exhibition through the lens of their phones – backlit and bright on the screen and mediated by that small blockade at arm’s length. Haslett places the scenes before us as a simple statement of observation, without a moralising refrain. These are moments captured with her camera during her own process of looking, and reported later in the studio. Rapid and small brushstrokes delineate the spaces within each canvas to render each image a fleetingly glimpsed scene. Through the muted palette of grey, the rectangular spaces of the galleries and works begin to slide in a slippage of layered surfaces, like losses to the visual periphery beyond the screen.

Nearby, Nancy Constandelia’s colourfields on French grey linen form poems in blue. Subtle gradations of colour are the result of a single, loaded brush drawn across the canvas, yielding less and less paint to the surface.