Upcoming exhibition: July-Aug 2014
Suerpdry and Other Panoramas,
New large scale drawings
MOP Gallery,
2 / 39 Abercrombie St Chippendale,
23 July- 17 August
http://www.mop.org.au/current.html
See the installation at MOP Gallery here: https://vimeo.com/101987435
In 1967, the land artist, Robert Smithson, undertook a ‘tour’ of Passic, New Jersey, where he documented the hulks of steel bridges, pumping plants and rusting water pipes sitting squatly on the land. He darkly called the views he documented ‘zero panoramas’, and ‘ruins in reverse’.
Superdry and other panoramas is not this. It does, however, search for a line of partial redemption between Smithson’s ‘ruins in reverse’ and the sites, views and panoramas that surround us in the city, the urban and beyond.
Through this series of large scale drawings and video projections Penelope Cain marks out lines of enquiry into the articulation between sublime, nature and the built, proposing a series of open ended questions about ‘the city’, beauty in the landscape and consumption, in what ever format these are experienced.
In these works Cain uses imagery sourced from her practice of walking around the city and beyond. She cuts lines through the meticulously drawn images to collide two spatial planes- one drawn on the paper and the other cut lines through the paper. The two spaces fight for primacy at the surface of the paper, creating a type of spatial glitch or rupture. In collapsing facets from the modern commercial city into panoramas of their cultural opposite of ‘nature’ or ‘sublime’, Cain marks out the terrain between these two constructs and the articulation between them.
This series of work commenced with the drawing Surface Tension, which was a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize, 2012, Art Gallery of NSW, and Ive been working on the series on and off since then.
Video link: Panorama at the base of cherry blossom mountain
