Trojan pony
December, 2011

Sculpture survey exhibitions are a rare treat in South Australia writes John Neylon.

Painting's stranglehold on the Fleurieu Art Prize program has been loosened a little by Sculpt11, an all-sculpture exhibition co-curated by Max Lyle and Silvio Apponyi. And that's not a bad thing. While pictorialists continue to find inventive ways of re-working landscape and still life traditions, the range of experiences on offer to a viewing public is always mediated through the "person looks at a picture" filter. Lyle, in his catalogue essay, stresses this point of difference when suggesting that the materiality of sculptures enhances the visual excitement, leading to "unexpected, marvelous and rewarding discoveries". More significantly, the presence of sculpture within the Fleurieu Biennale mix takes interpretation and representation into fresh territory.
Examples in Sculpt11 include Ron Rowe's timber assemblages which reference rural labor within settler communities, Gavin Malone's use of "indigenous" materials such as limestone and various timbers to explore processes of accommodation between human societies and the land and Deborah Sleeman's use of diverse materials and open-ended forms to convey notions of transience and permanence. John Wood searches for poetic equivalents to the Hills landscape in which he lives, while Max Lyle fuses ancient and contemporary elements to create a hybridity which speaks of spiritual balance and journeys, and Greg Johns brings together wave energy, landscape and ancestral forms to offer re-readings of the Australian landscape.
Group or survey sculpture exhibition are a rare species in South Australia, which is passing strange given the national pre-eminence of Adelaide-based contemporary sculpture in the later 20th century and the object or installation-embedded contemporary practice of many artists who work from, or have close associations with, South Australia. To this should be added the momentum and focus on sculpture generated by the Heysen Sculpture Biennial and the Palmer Project and sculptural work (plus solo shows) featuring regularly in commercial and alternative art spaces programming. I suspect this paucity of survey-type exhibitions has more to do with living in a post-(art)medium world in which many contemporary artists, who for the best of reasons,  don't want to have their work corralled as "painting", "sculpture", "photography" and so on. In the realm of sculptural practice this is particularly relevant as conceptually there is a great (and necessary) divide between objects that get called "sculpture" and other things which are better described as installations or defined by action verbs such as "occupying" a site or "defining" space.
It seems obvious from the curators' selection that this rare opportunity to survey sculptural studio practice wasn't going to be sidetracked by forays into theoretical and art-political speculation about the meaning and future of sculpture in a post-medium world. Otherwise one would have expected to see the inclusion of more fugitive, site-referencing, installation or polemical works by other Adelaide-based artists such as Roy Ananda, Akira Akira, Jonathon Dady, Louise Haselton, Julie Henderson, Julia Robinson and George Popperwell. So while accepting that this Sculpt11 selection favors a certain kind of studio sculptural practice defined largely by an emphasis on visually coherent, self-contained form with an overlay of symbolic or expressive properties, it does open the door for future curatorial interrogation of trends in object-based practice. From this perspective Sculpt11 might turn out to be a bit of a "Trojan Pony", destabilizing and even critiquing the pre-eminence of pictorialism within the Fleurieu Art Prize. Right now this is a special   opportunity to recognise and compare the diverse talents of leading South Australian sculptors as showcased in Sculpt11 and displayed to advantage in the impressive Signal Point Gallery space.

Sculpt11 ­ 2011 Fleurieu Sculpture Invitational
Signal Point Gallery Goolwa Wharf (also presenting The Fleurieu Water Prize)
Until December 5