Transitional Objects
Our Neon Foe, Leichhardt
October 1-31, 2020
Curated by Sophie Kitson
Featuring: Greta Balog, Rat Bedlington, Raquel Caballero, Troy Donaghy, Allie Foster, Angela Garrick, Sophie Kitson, Simon Lawrence, Nadia Odlum, Stephanie Overs, Anthony Toohey
Transitional Objects is a group exhibition that explores the world of comfort, in reference to the objects and physical things we use to help us through big events or moments of change. Transitional objects are both practical and tangible; as well as fleeting and temporary like the memories and experiences they come to symbolise.
In early childhood development, the notion of the transitional object first appeared in 1951 by psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott. It now has since evolved to incorporate objects of many kinds, including representations of objects of comfort, spirituality, and the divine.
Documentation (c) Harrison Witsey 2020
Room Text:
Material threads the room, beginning with Yoga Flag (2015) by Stephanie Overs, offering a grounding to the space. Bold and triumphant, it stakes a claim in its’ ouroboros chain of infinity. Maybe we are forever transitioning, locked in a feedback loop of liminality, and if we are, what practices can we utilise to help us live and experience that space? I hear yoga helps.
Or maybe sleep? That is what I imagine has occurred over and over on the sheets hanging in the backyard in Troy Donaghy’s Washing Line Studies (2020). Body and mind regeneration, happening nightly. The bed, our bed, my bed -- a most visited place to retreat to when things get complicated. The act of washing, cleansing, refreshing, and airing out your laundry allows us to recalibrate with fresh perspectives and fresh sheets.
The bed is a place we also invite other objects of comfort to live - like Allie Foster’s FLOD (Furry Loveable Outrageous Dude, 2020), a handsome stoic guard to the gallery space, leaning casually with a burning stare (the kind you see when someone is really listening to you) looking out to the busy world, a silent therapist available 24/7. FLOD in the truest sense of the transitional object is busy absorbing the experiences we need a bit of help with, silently acknowledging where you were, and where you are now. Perhaps FLOD was made as an empty vessel, a proxy in pure white for projection and protection. Or maybe he is already exhausted, taking on the problems of anyone who is brazen enough to lock eyes with them.
The other characters we see looking at us are strangely familiar, Dolly Parton (2019), and Creedence Clearwater Revival (2019), and Greta Balog’s friend, Mahmood Fazal (2019). At an almost lifelike scale, the three portraits stand in for these real life people who offer the world inspiration, guidance, solace, and entertainment through music and storytelling. Greta captures the spirit of connection through their inviting gazes, and utilises the portraits as a memorialising document of her own passage of change.
Nadia Odlum’s Commute (2019) pares down her physical journey between home (A) and studio (B) in a hauntingly beautiful lithograph mapping movement of change over a period of months. The contours of the journey marked with a simple, accumulating repetitive line is recorded always the same, a hint to a strengthening, a consistency, a growth that develops with perseverance.
Sitting opposite are three small colourful Untitled paintings by Angela Garrick (2020), three square canvases of similar composition - two women, you can imagine/assume were pulled from film stills of an episode of Baywatch. Each woman is slightly skewed, worn, warped, and disproportioned; a mystery of the archive. A batch of stills that require further investigation, objects found floating in a closed archive, depicting a story lost to history and context. If Angela (an archivist by day) could piece together their story would they be lifted out of obscurity and change state, no longer static, but moving again?
Another mystery object in the room is embedded with a QR code. If we scan it, we will be taken to a scene from Pennies From Heaven, the 1981 film starring Steve Martin (based on the 1978 BBC television drama of the same name, and consequently also the name of this giant lottery ticket, 2020). Racquel Caballero’s offering is comical, playful, oversized, and transformative (in all the senses of the word). The object is powerful in its symbolic intent - in this world it is a portal to the new, offering a quick escape from the lived experience of hardship, and in a filmic world, the QR code transports us to the hardships and desires of the characters of Pennies From Heaven.
The small blue ceramic vessel (Anxiety Container #1, 2020) made by Sophie Kitson stands small on a plinth so large, but unlike the transformative powers of Racquel’s work, this object serves as a stopper, a container for the anxiety of change, archived in the closed liminal space existing between lid and jar. This one is placed alone, but comes from a series of over thirty containers, each trapping a moment of consternation. If the lid was to be removed, where would that feeling go?
The other ceramic vessels found in the gallery huddle together on a silver platform, like instruments on a factory shelf. These structures by Simon Lawrence, Vessels, (2020) look built for purpose - functional forms not concerned with decoration, but shape and flow. A range of crucibles that allow state change, assisting very hot substances like metal and glass to melt and pour freely through their funnel-like chambers. Their facilitating nature risks their own stability, as their strength is diminished every time they enter the hot kiln, becoming brittle and hardened.
Anthony Toohey’s Empheral-20 (2020), embraces found objects of the natural world, collected thoughtfully and introduced into the gallery space to remind us of the flux occurring all around us in our environment. Documenting decay in a newly constructed hybrid piece of fused tree branches and flowers, incorporating nature in a way you would see like offerings placed in a shrine.
Below this offering we see what looks like the shrine. But this one is of a different agenda, of its own space-time, spirituality, religion. As Rat Bedlington’s title of the work suggests, within a flat space-time, the number of possible particle configurations in multiple universes would be incomprehensible. The particle arrangements must repeat in an infinite rhythm of possible futures. In one future you reside in a tower, in another you drift in a generation ship without aim (2020), we are taken on a journey or at least bear witness to the journey experienced by the figures in the painting, propped ever so slightly off the ground, floating in its own existence.