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Review May 26 2009 « | »
Terra Nihilus at Madox Arts The risk with a small exhibit incorporating a wide variety of media, is that the resulting collection will either......

Gianna Vaughan

The risk with a small exhibit incorporating a wide variety of media, is that the resulting collection will either be a half-baked response to the theme, or it will indulge in extreme naval-gazing on the part of the artists.

Fortunately Terra Nihilus which opened last week at the Maddox Art Gallery, displays such a high quality of work that each contributor succeeds in adding another intriguing layer to this artistic visualization of No Man's Land. Banishing clichéd trenches and white rooms, the inspiring diversity of style and medium pushes the viewer to consider the central theme in new ways.

The only photographer in the group show, Daniel Gustav Cramer, offers an intangible forest triptych. The images scream with detail but are relentlessly still. Everything and nothing balance in a moment of completeness.

Temsuyanger Longkumer has taken the most literal translation of Terra Nihilus, originally used by Europeans to refer to Australia, when they believed that the resident indigenous people were not, in fact, human. Born in Nagaland state in India, Longkumer's own tribal people suffered from a similar British conceit. His striking video installation, 'Portrait of a dance' projects a traditional Naga tribal dance onto the floor inviting the viewer to step into the shadows and partake in the dance. Although it is touted as 'playful', for me the work is tinged with sadness. The infinite repetition of identical motions is beautiful but ultimately going nowhere, like life-cycle that never alters regardless of who is dancing the steps.

My highlight of the exhibit was when fairytale horrors met modern tabloid sensationalism in the simultaneously comic and unnerving pieces of Chris Roantree and Emma Simpson. Inspired by the Hindu Upanishad arcane text, the Bhuttman series, drawn and sculpted by Roantree and Simpson respectively, plays with the riddle of telling a sacrosanct tale that cannot be told. Placed in scenes of sci-fi esq. horror, the animals of childhood cartoons like Charlotte's Web and Animal Farm, are helpless observers to the inevitable spread of this adult bogey man. In a playful realization of this all-seeing entity, as he spreads, the Bhuttman infects everything with ever multiplying eyes. The stuff of fantasy and nightmare tied into one, neither good nor bad, just resoundingly omnipresent.

Contrastingly, some of Hugo Wilson's work is almost uncomfortably realistic. Central in the gallery space are three sculptures exploring the scientific explanation of what happens to the human heart when it hyper-ventilates. By injecting resin into the heart's ventricles, Wilson has captured the area between the muscles, the negative space. The glossy, hard surfaces of the structures give them a deadening quality, a stark reminder of the ubiquity of human mortality. This plays well against Wilson's animal drawings which appear conceptually ridiculous, but so real you want to touch them.

All the artists involved in Terra Nihilus have interpreted No Man's Land as a somehow communal space or sensation. Unusually perhaps, whilst each artist has represented their subject in a very individual manner, they have each chosen to do so by recognising how it is the universality of experiences that ultimately creates a neutral equality.

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