Weightless Matter - Oddaný
We went to see Weightless Matter at Oddaný directly after visiting the Affordable Art Fair. Let me tell you those two experiences couldn’t be further apart even if they tried. But I’m decidedly not going to tell you about the Kmart stock room we found at the exhibition building masquerading as “affordable”, instead I’m going to tell you about Ava Nunan’s poetic responses to Max Frances’ abstract paintings currently on show at Oddaný.
We arrived at a silent gallery of rapt patrons scattered across the floor - we could hardly slide into the room save for standing at the back. We missed all the other poets that read on the night, but arrived just in time for Nunan’s readings of her work. Usually I’ll say poetry is written to be read aloud. Even if I’m reading poetry alone in a silent room, I’ll read it aloud to myself, because old habits die hard, and my year 11 Lit teacher (shout out OT) was a great man who taught me the importance of poetry, but the further importance of breathing life into the words. Yet sadly, I found that Nunan’s poems felt flatter when spoken. They were almost forced. The line that stood out to me was from an aside between poems, which sounded more like poetry than the words that were intended as such; “my biggest fear, apart from worms and snails and slugs and cockroaches and heights, is time.”
However, the poems work excellently visually. The weight they lacked when spoken is found when manifested physically. They’re framed behind cracked glass, or literally weighted down with smooth black stones, or (my favourite) painted on gauzy fabric, draped and layered over itself. The textural realisation of these visual expressions of the poems links them further than just being responses to Frances’ expressive and textured paintings. I often struggle to find the words to write about abstract art except for its physicality, but I’m in luck in this case because the materiality of these works is rich. The oil pastel catches on the linen and leaves a scratchy roughness showing through the smooth and slick pastel. The pumice powder dusts the surface of some, creating the feeling that these paintings have been left in a damp inner north sharehouse to grow the same black mould which plagued the ceiling of my old place. They’re organic and flowing and growing. Dancing sunlight on the surface of a green pond or the dark rough forest floor that the worms and bugs call home.
The show is a call and response, Nunan’s poems expressed as artworks in conversation with Frances’ abstract textural paintings. You haven’t missed out by not attending the opening, but I would recommend you still catch the show any time til the 5th of September at Oddaný on Sydney road in Brunswick.