Submitted Review

‘Snow Globe’

  • Lon Gallery • Melbourne

  • 01 May—06 June 2020

  • Donald Holt • Published 10 May 2020

The title of this show could not be more apt, the confined world that has a myriad of entities swirling in an unseen pattern. Occasionally a set of flakes glint in unison catching our attention among the endless fleeting possibilities. You feel that this frozen moment may be replaced by another seconds later, but here we are.

Nordin’s stand-alone sculptural assemblages differ from the recent immersive installations where the grit & texture harbours associative space. These works insinuate themselves into the exhibition flirting with figuration, landscape and formal tropes while being gooey and scratchy at once.

Day’s works are similarly touched and handled, watercolour buckling or leeching into pigment prints. Intentionally evasive images, they allow overall cartoon illusions to deliquesce into the manner of their own making. I was unfamiliar with Day’s work but came away charmed by these.

The two new pieces by Dolman are arranged in the perpendicular across the space. The debate been an oozy formlessness revision of optical 70s graphic design and the pictorial implication of architecture betrayed by the nonchalantly rendered foreground is conflated by the opposing display of these works.  One mounted thickly, formally to the wall the other slumped on a shelf.  Hinting at sandwich boards or billboards again with the use of blackboard paint.

Between these two works is Perval’s Arena #2. A literal barrier, perhaps dividing the display argument of Dolmans works.  The re-presentation of this work from Perval’s VCA exhibition still holds weight. One leg of the barrier, a cast bronze hand in fey repose. This to me a monument to queer struggle and revolution, to the barricades we all want to build and burn.

Illusions to Gober & Bourgeois here remind us of the other potent flecks of light that fill the spaces between the works in the exhibition, all energized with a little agitation.