Lampropoulou, Morris, Power, and White - First Site Gallery
Morris
I went to First Site in search of Aleksander Morris’s Memory Tides. I got a taste of the show at this year's Emerging Artist Awards and was keen to see how it would come together in its entirety. I came away loving every moment of the four shows on view at the moment. The through line flowing through them makes it hard to focus on only one. In having them all together in that subterranean space - cool and dry where Melbourne couldn’t decide if it should pour or shine outside, tram rattles and street chatter filtering through the open door - the shows amalgamated, becoming more than their own islands of memory and grief.
Morris’s Memory Tides captures the trying to remember, the murky waters of your own family’s stories in phosphorescent neons and pseudo-cyanotype oil paints. The faces obscured, the forms wavering, the colours wrong, reminders that even your own memories, your own photographs aren’t gospel truth. The work is dreamlike in the most real sense. More than even in his own gallery space, I was thinking of Morris and remembrance when parsing through Jade Power’s site specific Sun Casts. The playing with uncontrollable elements, ceding power to nature, sunlight, Melbourne weather, Power allows her porcelain works to be a physical reminder of the passage of time and the battering that alone can give.
Stav Lampropoulou’s The Wandering Womb and Other Myths was not what I expected. It felt haunted, eerie, but all too familiar. There’s the dress in the corner – pinned with notes, remembrances from viewers past. The videos – incongruously placed, chopping, changing. The poetry – putting words to being haunted by your own body, what it does to you, who believes you and who doesn’t. The dress, its notes, invite you to leave your worries, let the dress hold them for you, so you might find relief in shedding them like a too tight sweater.
I encountered these vessels of grief again in Dominic White’s Teebeluck Kormtenner Timmarere (White Devil Spirit Basket). There were many ways his show invited you in, made you part of what was on view: with stick resonators, with video works. I found myself drawn back to the objects, the shadows they cast, the weights they carried. The grief vessels give form to a yearning that is so innately human. Haven’t we all wanted to excise our traumas, give them external form so they need not weigh so heavily inside? In giving them this physical form – large, undeniable – opposite to Lampropoulou, White makes clear that whatever form our grief takes, it is our own to carry. Giving it physical form however, makes it a burden shared, a load that could be hoisted by another, even for a brief reprieve.
I went to First Site after a week of viewing some truly bad art. Not just technically bad, but non-resonate, nothing deeper than the surface, 3-star hotel lobby, just an object on a table, a thing on a wall, kinda bad. On the other hand, Morris, Lampropoulou, White, and Power reminded me how good art seeps into your bones, becomes part of you, something you look back and want to remember, in whatever amorphous shape your mind gives it.
The shows are on show until September 18th at First Site.