The opening of Fragmented Tensions at Blindside was not somewhere I lingered when I visited on Thursday night. Each year Blindside facilitates an Emerging Curator Mentorship, and this year Ella Simpson was mentored by the gallery’s artistic directors. Charlotte wrote on Simpson’s work when we went to the RMIT Post-Grad show last year but this Blindside show sadly feels far from the success of the artist’s grad show presentation. Fragmented Tensions is a series of works made in response to the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Melbourne, which Simpson has been engaging with for two years as a way of exposure therapy to contamination based OCD.
Eugenie Gullifer Laurie’s Variants are what stand out to me the most, as they’re emblematic of the whole show. These are gummy sticky masses of things stuck into bio-silicone, making goopy messes that look like you’d find them growing in the bottom of a bin. I’ve been seeing this kind of work coming out of undergrads at art school for years, the obsession with the grotesque - the recreation of the Piss Christ of it all! They do nothing for me, and not even in the repulsive way, which would still be a reaction worth writing about. Even the title of the exhibition is a disappointment, it feels like it was chosen from a random generator of exhibition titles, and is incongruous with the show - ‘Fragmented Tensions’ could describe any of the shows I’ve ever seen at Blindside in the last 5 years.
This isn’t to say the work in the show is bad or not worthwhile or holding meaning. I liked Sebastian Nuttney’s Weathering Coast, disappearing Hinterland, a stop motion of sorts printed on thermal paper. Tenuous and ephemeral, the prints are fleeting like the coastlines they depict might be if unprotected. Perhaps many of the works in this show would make more sense if they were presented amongst the specimens they were inspired by from the Harry Brookes Allen Museum, or if they were presented in the museum itself.
Some of these works have strength on their own merits, but presented together in this exhibition they’re weakened. I expected more from the emerging curator mentorship and Blindside. If you’d like to make your own mind up about the show, it’s on at Blindside until the 21st of November.