Tranquillity

An exhibition by

Rose Farrell, George Parkin, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green 
 
 

Level 2 Contemporary Project Space
8 May to 19 June 2005

This project brings together two of Australia's most established collaborative partnerships: Rose Farrell/George Parkin and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. In the arrangement of photographs, sculpture and video their exhibition seeks to explore the fraught nuances of visual and cultural memory.

Each long wall of the Level 2 contemporary project space contains three spot-lit, transparent duraclear photographs (by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green) suspended parallel from the wall, casting ghostly shadows of the images held within and acting like portholes to the outside world. In fact these photographs are referenced from diverse cultural sources; in one image, a floating astronaut is juxtaposed with a portrait of the actor Johnny Depp pointing a gun at the viewer, the American artist Robert Smithson smashing up glass sheets and an Aboriginal elder holding a new-born child. In both process and in content, Brown and Green's images open up with historical, contemporary and possibly futuristic connotations.

At each end, facing the short walls of the exhibition space, is a spot-lit Tranquilizing chair (by Rose Farrell and George Parkin), the kind used in the 1800s to control patients by restraining their arms and legs. Two video projections, drawn from archival video stills by Farrell and Parkin, form a fixed viewpoint in front of each chair. These projected sequences potentially reflect the thoughts of each chair's occupant. In one video, Nature, scenes of trees and lakes in Montreal or interspersed with stills of Parkin on the chair he and Farrell first made and filmed in 1991. And in Metropolis scenes from Berlin, Manhattan, Potsdam, Brooklyn and Melbourne are mixed together. Similar to the photographs by Brown and Green, these videos function as a mindscape of collected memories; haunting, intriguing and impressionistic.

The darkened gallery allows each of the elements created by Farrell/Parkin and Brown/Green to complement the other, while the harmony of light unifies them together as one ethereal whole. Collectively, they create a psychological roomscape of visual memories and 'windows' to imagined and possible places.

Rose Farrell and George Parkin have been exhibiting together for more than twenty years and Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have been working together since 1989.

Exhibition floortalk - Wednesday 25 May, 5.30pm
Natasha Bullock, Assistant Curator, Photography and Contemporary Art, will give a floortalk, as part of the gallery's Art After Hours program.