Nine miles apart

Group Show: Christmas Party
Anna Miles
27 November - 20 December 2008

This show of nine Anna Miles artists has a dense (but not distracting) salon hang of mostly small works. There are also other items in the drawer cabinet and table, and on the lightboxes between the windows.

As the title suggests the exhibition has a celebratory air – but no thematic focus. Few Xmas shows do.

Personally for me, the biggest surprises are the large Kim Meeks’ works that are earlier than his recent show. They have obvious affinities with Andrew McLeod and Gavin Hipkins with their use of sourcing book illustration and fine digital detailing, and much more concise than his colour work.

Janet Green’s urns impress with their simple shapely elegance and delicate, almost translucent colouration, while Richard Stratton’s ceramics, through ornate, don’t cloy but amuse through an insistently light but bold graphic touch.

The circular images by innovative photographer Darren Glass show his use of motion to create blurry spirals. They coincidentally seem related to Paul Hartigan’s recent neon sculpture, but are mysterious as traces.

Sriwhana Spong’s flat lacquer ornaments, with bits of embedded mirror and chain, are refreshingly organic and unpristine. Their squashed, casual lumpiness gives them an aesthetic of manual vulgarity that stands out in Miles’ gallery, an unexpected but scintillating crudeness.

Works illustrated – descending from top to bottom - are by Octavia Cook, Kim Meeks, Janet Green, Richard Stratton (urn and plate), and Darren Glass.

Dj of the ornamental

Kim Meek: Hoopla
Anna Miles
16 July - 2 August 2008

Kim Meek is one of those artists who rakes over the web searching for interesting images to find, dismember and digitally re-fuse with other elements. His use of sampling however, when applied to a passion for the ornamental, makes him similar to a dj using turntables as an instrument, mixing beats and blending tunes. He likes pattern and rhythm, and putting normally incongruous surfaces together in layers so they look natural. His sources are wildly unpredictable, from images of bizarre forms of animal life to illustrations of tropical fruit, from circus posters to Islamic architectural tracery, from Mughal sword blade motifs to Japanese prints, American comics and English textiles.

The resulting hybrids are a bit like Richard Killeen’s digital images but are not self referential as his can be. These also have no interest in spatial illusion, being flat and collagelike. Nor are they always precise, for sometimes they have a folk-artish rawness, a rough painterliness - depending on where the image has come from.

To continue with the music analogy, because aural sensation has more impact on the body than visual, optical work like this rarely has the immediate visceral power that music often has. And they do seem like complicated, icy, cerebral exercises to some degree, not sweeping you away. Yet the delicate complexity of Meek’s work draws you in, making you stand close to appreciate them. Most of their detail cannot be captured in photographs because background and foreground are carefully woven together (and often tonally matched) to make the whole picture-plane a busy, seething surface.

It’s not all abstract sensation though. Allusions via pendulous fruit and nut forms to testicles and breasts, and sliced squid to vulvas, introduce a slightly creepy humour. They have a devious surreal undercurrent that enriches them. Meek has picked forms loaded with associations. They may not be immediately visceral but they do have a dreamlike ability to startle music rarely can provide.