18.04.2013 – 04.05.2013
Brooke Babington | Christo Crocker | Eliza Dyball | Noriko Nakamura
What Has (Has Not) combines works that take lack as their generative impulse. By pointing indirectly toward their subjects, skirting the issue or avoiding the point, each artist speaks volumes about what is lacking and what has (has not) been done – the twin impulses of making and unmaking as the nexus of creative effort.
Eliza Dyball and Christo Crocker address absence in their work; what is not present defines their parameters – for Christo Crocker this means spanning gaps and framing voids with a humorous nod to nihilistic futility, while Eliza Dyball considers the absence and creation of form and abstraction in language – creating a tension between the materiality of the human voice and its residual qualities when disembodied.
Procedural lack rather than physical absence characterises Brooke Babington’s work. All (traditional) artifice is stripped from her paintings in which raw art materials speak of what is not done or has been undone.
Similarly, Noriko Nakamura’s alchemical concoctions of elemental or residual matter such as human or animal hair have a formlessness and naturalness that seems to defy intervention by the artist’s hand.