Acid Reign

by Andrew Frost
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What is future for the white cube gallery? This vexed question is being asked in the face of the ongoing crisis in the commercial gallery sector as depressed sales and post-GFC gloom puts a question mark over the traditional artist-gallerist relationship. So what else could it be? Could sales go online, could artists cut out the middleman, could a new kind of gallery experience emerge? Perhaps in part answer to these questions Platform 72 dissolves most of the high brow snobbery of the gallery for the egalitarian access of the shop with exhibitions by artists mixed nestled in with a selection of homewares, jewellery and accessories.

The exhibition Acid Reign by Sarah Howell is the hybrid gallery’s latest offering, a mixture of bright graphic art works – large collages and smaller prints that explore “…altered states of perception through drug use and takes influence from drug cultures effect on art.” The classic elements of psychedelic art are all there – bright contrasting colours, elements of pareidolia-inducing patterning aided by the addition of googly eyes, and life-death motifs including skulls and skeletons. The complete adherence to the psychedelic menu is admirable, but Howell’s real ace is the contrast of the works, a by-product of the digital age the artist’s Haight forberas could only have dreamed about.

Pic: Sarah Howell, Acid Reign, 2014. Giclée archival and non-archival print, 33x33cms.

Platform 72, Darlinghurst