Humans are out and funny creatures are in

By Rhonda Dredge

Often artists working outside the system in peculiar places produce the best work. The French are good at theorising the overlooked. Funny little creatures might need a bit of understanding. They cry out for some attention in a busy world.

On a shelf in one of the gallery spaces was an abandoned bio-cup and two small stones. Were they left there by someone on purpose as a clue?

There’s no denying that the still life has been overlooked in this year’s graduate exhibition at the Victorian College of the Arts.

This is significant for art watchers who regularly visit the graduate show to see what the latest crop of students value. What is on trend and what has been relegated to being an artifact of a dying civilization?

Students learn how to deal with limits and there were some nice little moments on display in the exhibition, figurative renderings of small corners near drains and footpaths, for example.

These settings drift into your memory but they were painted from photographs so there was too much detail for the images to really stick.

A drawing records just the main facts. The rest is invention. The artist enhances the image so it passes across to the viewer’s mind. Freshness soon fades but a concept helps plug the image in. What do you remember the next day or the one after that? Is novelty more important than content?

A robotic hand that crept across the floor when activated by a foot was pretty mind-boggling as were the vibrant paintings of someone called Michael who wrote his name across all of them.

More modest was a work called Dear Young Poet that was so beautifully rendered that it clawed its way into your mind. The work depicted a scrawny hand reaching across an empty space while a few linear strands of face seemed to ignore its gesture.

Dear Young Poet was particularly seductive because it was in the Photography Department and there was not a trace of the digital about it.

Good art is subversive. Many have tried to create a formula but failed. It works in the moment, showing up the zeitgeist for all of its pretensions. The dear young poet was having a moment of doubt. Aren’t we all!

Painting was certainly the dominant force with this year’s crop of artists and that will annoy the 3D people who were more subdued this year. Painting has been so deconstructed in the past two decades that it was a pleasure to see it whole again.

Most of the painting genres were present including neo-Gothic, landscape, gestural, geometric, illustrative, tonal and graphic. There was no abstract expressionism, popular in recent years with its heavy impasto applications, nor still life.

In fact, narrative work appeared to have made a strong comeback after being the poor cousin of materiality for a decade or two.

Paintings and even video installations came with blurbs and quotes this year. “Life is a beautiful sport” was a quote from Lacoste used by Bronte Stolz in her study of the consumer, a generic creature defined by the products on display and swiftly dismissed as a lightweight in the battle for exposure.

The Michael series came with a narrative about love that was quite endearing while the illustrative paintings of Sara Brasier gave small creatures a plug. One work showed the revenge of sword-wielding ants and a warrior butterfly and another a precarious place for creatures in a tree where they were making the most of their moment of peace by pouring tea out of an elephant teapot.

Is Brasier still hovering in the magic faraway tree of childhood or are her funny fantasy pictures lighting up our dreary days with a bit of fancy?

The magic has it in this year’s exhibition. Humans are out and funny creatures are in.