For Lease – Reinterpreting Place

By Sharne Wolff

http://breezeblock.com.au/

It seems rather apt somehow that an exhibition concerned with ideas of permanence and belonging should be forced to juggle its display areas just prior to opening day. Breezeblock is a versatile artist-run space – the consequence of arrangements between artist Sean Rafferty and the owners of an inner city building to make use of temporary vacancies. For Lease: Reinterpreting Place is a group display curated by Chloe Wolifson. In her essay she notes that each artist “draws on aspects of cultural and social histories, and like the space they currently inhabit, they re-examine supposed certainties of place, creating something new in the process”.

Artist Michael Lindeman plays the role of dissatisfied tenant in his sardonic oversized letter on canvas titled Dear Real Estate Agent. Joan Ross’s short digital animation Touching Other People’s Butterflies debunks the myths created by colonial artists regarding ownership of land, while Kenzee Patterson’s galvanized steel grilles embedded with native flower emblems are inspired by the in/out dilemma of suburban window mesh. Marathon, JD Reforma’s suite of photographs and accompanying text, references events in The Swimmer – a surreal 1964 tale of suburban mid life crises by American John Cheever. Jake Walker and David Eastwood’s practices currently share a conceptual overlap with architecture. A sculptural glazed ceramic frame ‘houses’ Walker’s linen canvas while Eastwood’s intimate acrylic paintings on canvas provide alternative perspectives on the 20th century Italian artist, Giorgio Morandi’s, studio.

Breezeblock, Potts Point
Pic: JD Reforms Marathon 2013
inkjet photograph on newsprint [artist text with extracts from The Swimmer by John Cheever, first published 18 July 1964 in The New Yorker accompanying]
31.5 x 92 cm (photograph), 21 x 29.7 cm (text). Pic: Hugh Marchant.
This work originally commissioned for Das Superpaper Issue #28, September 2013
Courtesy the artist.