Speculative Spaces

By Carrie Miller

Marcel Duchamp created a number of reproductions of his works in miniature. He would buy leather briefcases and fill them with miniature replicas, photographs, and colour reproductions of works. The intention was to make the sort of samples that travelling salesmen carried. The results were pieces imbued with the special potency that comes with small things.

David Eastwood has been interested in making drawings and paintings of artists’ studios for a while. This has led him to curate Speculative Spaces, a show dedicated to artists who work with the miniature – maquettes and dioramas created as ‘speculative spaces’ that are interpreted through the images they have made from a variety of mediums.

Eastwood is specifically interested in the studio of Giorgio Morandi – the great 20th Century Italian still life painter. His interest in the artist’s studio is as a space where invention and imagination happens and the way this idea is mythologised.

The artist has produced a model of Morandi’s studio that is one fifteenth its actual size. He hasn’t visited the space, which isn’t the point. Working from a distance preserves an element of Eastwood’s own imagination. And interestingly, Morandi’s studio is, in fact, a posthumously reconstructed one. In this sense, it is a model itself.

Small spaces such as the one Eastwood has made are akin to dollhouses – a space which can’t be entered, but is nevertheless somewhere we are drawn into by our ability to take a peek as we would through a keyhole. This seductive quality is just one thing that makes these spaces so irresistible.

Artist include Kylie Banyard, Anna Carey, David Eastwood, Eugenia Ivanissevich, Col Jordan, Mark Kimber, Amanda Marburg, Rob McHaffie, and Peter Nelson.

Until March 26

Robin Gibson Gallery, Darlinghurst

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