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TIM STERLING
Trajectory 3 April to 3 May "For an artist with such an intimate and intense practice, requiring a great deal of precision (technical and intellectual) Tim is quite prolific. How do you turn a sheet of perspex into a mushroom cloud? Tim would know. Like an alchemist he seems to be able to bend the laws of physics. The works often seem like hallucinations, there but not there, solutions to impossible tasks. Conventional physical laws break down in his practice. In is zone of imminence, physical properties mutate, along with the meanings of the signs he uses. A filing cabinet, heavy, carrying a lot of information, sometimes secret, the information itself less important than the fact it is properly set out, transparent to the one who needs it organised. This work is kind of spooky, Tim often contrasts the manic and the complicated with absolute stillness and lightness, like in those dreams where I rock up back at school, fully grown and with no pants, back in a world I am trying to forget. Dream tension, and being office stuff, it's like, if you think the right thought, you could escape it all, and from certain angles, Tim's work actually does dissolve before your eyes." (Matthew Bradley, FANTASIA cat essay, 2002) Tim Sterling is an Adelaide-based artist who graduated from SA School of Art with Honours in 1999. He has exhibited regularly in Adelaide and recently in New Zealand & at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. He is a 2004 Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship recipient. REVIEW Tim Sterling's work - intricately, meticulously, obsessively constructed - covers quite a spectrum: signification that ranges from the hot overload of Bomb, Sterling's piece in the 2000 show, Gleam, to the 'cool' of the large transparent grid in this exhibition. All invite the dual application of the viewer's wonder and curiosity in tandem with an investigative, constructive imaginative engagement. Sterling's pieces, through their fragility and transparency, required constant re-verification: gleams and reflections, temporary invisibilities or transparency rendered them permanently unstable, evanescent. In Trajectory Sterling disposed a group of his pieces - to make more evident than hitherto their other, less formalist and more fictive function. The pieces played on two spatial and architectural themes. One concerned office space and workaday utilitarian furniture and fittings: wastepaper bin, air-conditioning vent, filing cabinet. The other posited the childhood space - and thereby the childhood 'time' - of playground and toys: a grid of bars to climb in and through. It would seem that they meant to overlay upon each other the one's supposed innocence (and expanded freedom, reverie and play) and the other's work-bound constraint and system. Which would make for a troubled, worrisome childhood - or a more mysteriously impish and feckless adult world? Or the suggestion of a continuum? Was this 'curious'? The formal intricacy of the pieces' construction served to divert us into the deeply but idly wondering gaze of a reflection that was both adult and childlike. Ken Bolton PUBLICATION Invitation: 1/6th A4 full colour card catalogue: 420mm x 99mm card tri-fold, full colour, 6 images. Separate essay by Ken Bolton MEDIA Stephanie Radok "Sweet Obsession" The Adelaide Review, May 2003, page 14-15. Maria Bilske "Art found up: Adelaide - South of the border" Art Monthly Aust No 160, pages 26-29. James Strickland "Warren Vance+Tim Sterling" Broadsheet vol 32 no 2, page 28. |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Lara Thompson |