Glasses like cherries

There’s a cocktail with a cherry on a stick, a pair of round sunglasses and the words “the blue hour” written in French on a pale moon.

A mood descends, perhaps a missed moment in some bar on the Riviera.

Evening is here and pretences are dropping.

It could be you, languishing with a faded flower and a knowing glance at the one who got away.

Whose glasses are they? A lover’s? Your’s? What do they signal to a viewer? Are you being too analytical? Are you being drawn in by a tableau?

The answer is yes. Kate Daw has got you wondering. The painter has enclosed you in a narrative and you’re enjoying the experience.

Later that day you see a pair of round retro sunglasses on a man on the street. He’s also wearing three-quarter length overalls, one strap draped, and has a single line tattoo of an anchor on his calf.

That’s when you realise that style is the material Daw is working. The man’s companion is wearing a gold teddy bear jacket and a Gucci sling bag in red Marmont velvet. Could she be Daws’s alter-ego?

Daw’s paintings Show me Grace turn out to be silkscreened on calico and chalked on slate boards. They are retro, intimate, fun and play a welcome personal note at the current exhibition Overdrawn at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, proving that narrative opens up meaning just as forcefully as concept, perhaps more so.

Rapture Between Two Cities is another alluring exhibit in the collaboration between the Victorian College of the Arts and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Artist and architect Eleanor Lim Shan is looking at the livelihood of the city itself and has exhibited fanciful remakes of the CBD’s major thoroughfare Swanston St in large digital prints and a booklet.

Lim Shan is interested in the cultural context of four city blocks of people and buildings. The project is ambitious and novel. She calls it Manifesto City.

This time the thinker is drawn in. The concepts are stimulating. She wants to “divert pedestrians from the linearity of the boulevards so they engage with the chaotic perchance happenings.”

She wants to draw ideas into Swanston St and has divided the street into 22 poetic parts.

Draws, chests and wardrobes hide secrets. They are the tools of speculation.

Buildings have been identified and superimposed on others, creating new hybrid spaces where celebration can occur.

The mystery of things will be revealed.

The couple in the designer clothes was last seen getting on a ferris wheel somewhere near the LaTrobe library. His glasses were like cherries.