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25 January-18 February 1996: REGION George Popperwell This was a major work by South Australian based artist George Popperwell. One half of the gallery - the one that the visitor initially walked into - was empty, its boundary marked by a dividing wall. Passing that, one entered a space that was filled with shapes and forms constructed out of marine plywood. These referenced various scales and expressions of architecture: from flat sheets at the far end of the space that suggested both decorative ogees in walls as well as funerary slabs, to simple cubes, to buildings with eves and roofs, some entire, some sectioned. Model scale, architectural scale, and space was used: the shifts between the units re-inforcing the reading of some of the units as being representational of (another thing elsewhere) as well as (just) being there. As usual in Popperwell's work the piece was both seductive and resistant to immediate reading, however it did not take long for the references to the idea of the necropolis to come through: in particular the way that some crypts found in graveyards are models themselves of larger architectural forms. In turn, this lead to a reading of some of the architectures modelled as camps, with all that such resonances imply as regards the holocaust and final solution. Impressively these ghosts were conjured without melodrama, but with quietness and weight. |
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