Scene on Crown
At last week’s jacaranda party in Paddington, we met the owner of a gallery up on Crown Street, Blank_Space, which we’ve been meaning to visit since it opened, but, well, these things happen. Or don’t, that is. However, personally informed of an imminent new show opening, we could hardly fail to make the effort, so part of last night was spent at the top of the hill looking at new art by Jane Dowton and Bianca Calandra, both new artists to me, each working in distinct media, but together making for an excellent exhibition, entitled “Curious Things.” Although Bianca Calandra’s work uses mixed media, and Jane Dowton’s working in photography, both have a found object component, Calandra’s more traditionally so, something on the order of collage in the Rauschenberg manner, but with a more playful, naïve content. Dowton’s objet trouvé component being a condition more of her imaginative use of everyday encounters with text and objects that might usually be ignored. The surprising richness of color and texture in her series, “Piles of Rocks from My Mum’s Farm (Classified and Unclassified),” exemplify at the higher end of abstraction the elevation of the quotidian both artists attempt, and I think more successfully than Calandra’s paintings, perhaps as a result of the latter’s inclusion of textual elements, not themselves “found” but composed, which, I think, subverts the effect. Still, it was a good show, an excellently presented space, and drew a good crowd.