Permutations at Home — Home@735, Exhibition Text

Somchai Charoen, Stack Vases, 2015, slip-cast ceramics (Image courtesy of Home@735)

I recently had the pleasure of writing an article for Home@735 about their latest exhibition of captivating work by Somchai Charoen, Savina Hopkins, Genevieve Felix Reynolds and Samuel Cutcher. The show runs until September 13th – go and check it out at 735 Bourke Street, Redfern in Sydney.

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Home@735 is not your usual gallery. It avoids the somewhat predatory environment of commercialism often found elsewhere, as we are invited to wander the corridors of a terrace house and take-in its curated offerings. The gallery maintains the charm of an inner-city terrace and although all personal accoutrements of domesticity have been removed to the private rooms of the house, there is still a welcome sense of informality, as if stepping off Bourke Street into a friend’s home. Narrow corridors and nooks encourage us to look closely and provide the rare intimacy of uninterrupted ‘home’ viewing.

The works of four artists are collected together for the gallery’s latest show, 19.08.15. The artists each deal with notions of transfiguration through evolving forms and space; and a subtle forcefulness is seemingly common to all of the works.

This is perhaps most obvious upstairs, in the work of Savina Hopkins, who dubs her work a ‘violent’ process of ‘masking and describing.’ Hopkins has transformed a number of black and white photographic studio portrait postcards, dating from 1910-1930, by cutting out the faces of the sitters and filling the void with carefully arranged band-aids. The sticking-plasters recall the contours of the figures’ faces in an abstract sense and the artificial skin tones of the band-aids breathe a half-life back into the black and white images. ...