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WARREN VANCE
Small Increments 3 April to 3 May A new body of work by mid-career South Australian artist, Warren Vance, this exhibition comprises a series of light-projection pieces of almost spiritual iconography. The applied source of collected materials - of world tourism souvenir slides, nature study, kaleidoscopes, theological references - are reconfigured into loops of metaphysical inquiry. This collagist practice with readymades consciously shifts 'view' towards interiority. Vance activates deeper resonances of narrative and recirculation within greater cycles of time. The pertinence of these meditations on transitoriness, this bound struggle between despair and awe, is a highlighting of those governing ethical inflexions that are incurred on the way and which chart our journeyed lives. Warren Vance graduated from the Victorian College of Arts in 1985 and has shown regularly in Adelaide and interstate including in the 2000 Chemistry exhibition at the Art Gallery of SA and in the 1993 Australian Perspecta Sydney. REVIEW Warren Vance showed here a cohesive installation of three elements whose house-of-cards delicacy of construction made the title's point: small increments. Vance emphasised both the physical slightness of the action and the transforming power of these incremental changes & juxtapositions. A video projected onto one wall a sequence of images: female portraits of Victorian or turn of century period alternating with the repeated projection of a circular kaleidoscope image. To the right, on another wall hung a rectangle of fabric printed with forest greenery. Optimistic, tawrdy, kitsch? Transforming this was a slide-projected Spanish Baroque saint, a Zurbaran, making it pious & 'spiritual'. The spiritual - & the Franciscan poverty - were repeated on the opposite side as well: projected into a large cardboard box (redolent of rubbish, a pauper's shelter) was an image of the interior of a cathedral. This again was a case of transformation by simple means towards the spiritual & transcendent. Across this axis (of faith, belief) ran the other projection: the formal portraits of the women suggested brief claims on posterity, records of existence, but also human frailty & the brevity of human life. In contrast the kaleidoscopically derived image that punctuated this sequence looked amoebic, suggesting the much longer timescale of a faceless, unindividuated species, a virus or other micro-organism. Coloured (a pale, variegated green), & moving (teledioscopic images of foliage), the crystal shapes seemed alive; by contrast the black-&-white of the women's portraits proclaimed them dead & of the past, though like the Zurbaran saint they must have made in their time many acts of faith. Ken Bolton PUBLICATION Invitation: 1/6th A4 full colour card Catalogue: 420mm x 99mm card, bi-fold, full colour, 4 images. Essay by Michael Newall. MEDIA Maria Bilske "Warren Vance" Undiscovered Artists, Australian Art Collector Issue 24, April-June 2003, page 52. Stephanie Radok "Sweet Obsession" The Adelaide Review, May 2003, page 14-15. Maria Bilske "Art round up: Adelaide - South of the border" Art Monthly Australia 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 |