The Language of Art

Official Website

The Commercial, Redfern

by Sharne Wolff

Displaying works that aren’t easy to pigeonhole, Mary Teague’s latest exhibition comprises photographs, installation pieces and, perhaps, sculptures all of which are ‘advertised’ by a bunch of posters affixed to the outside of the gallery. Introducing the show with a series entitled The Prairie, Teague’s posters pull together a sometimes-unlikely juxtaposition of images and snippets of colloquial text.

The catalogue essay for The Language of Art is littered with synonyms for vacant spaces. From every paragraph, voids, hollows, emptiness and absence eyeball the reader. The work itself reflects these ideas by various means, none more so overtly than Equivalence #1 – #7. Here the cardboard pages from found and imperfect photo-mount frames are scanned and enlarged to make oversize prints. Installed together on one wall, the empty frames embody the essence of minimalism – but as a consequence of their making, the pictures paradoxically take on semi-sculptural qualities and emphasise the void. It’s this relationship of photograph and sculpture, and between two and three dimensions, that Teague sets out to explore. The essay further enlightens us that the show “invites us into the inner world of the artist, but in the end we are relegated to an encounter with the trimmings, borders and ephemera understood to be the ‘language’ of contemporary art”.

Pic: Mary Teague – Installation view Language of Art, 2014 [Equivalence wall] (photo: Jessica Maurer) Courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery.