Shifter
Museum of Art and Culture yapang Lake Mcquarie NSW.
Featuring artists Monika Morgenstern, Marian Drew, Rebecca Najdowski and Ioulia Panoutsopoulos.
View exhibition until 4 February 2024.
“Reminiscent of encountering a church cathedral, majestic sunset, or celestial night sky, [Morgenstern’s] ‘Helios’, ‘Neomenia’ and ‘Luna’ suggest a mystical experience. The compositions of bright colour and geometric forms fading into ambiguity, also draw visual and conceptual parallels with early 20th century spiritual abstraction and with nonrepresentational colour field paintings of the 1950s and 60s. Residing somewhere between paintings, sculptures and holograms, these artworks invite close inspection and intimate navigation. They offer a momentary salve for the human yearning for something more.
Like ‘Analemma’ and ‘Penumbra’, ‘Vanishing’ references the late 19th century idea of ectoplasm. Its iridescent gold ink and receding parallel lines also echo Baroque sculptural masterpiece the ‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’. Teresa of Ávila is shown fainting during a supernatural religious encounter with an angel while rays of glinting divine energy rain down from above.
The surface of ‘Vanishing’ offers a fragmented mirror image of the viewer – a moment of self-reflection or the feeling of being observed through a two-way mirror. Its appearance and title speak to presence and absence”.
Exhibition text - Shifter December 2023
In Shifter four contemporary artists working across various media probe the intersection of physical form and visual perception.
Central to their practices is the ever-present phenomena of light. In addition to being biologically fundamental to life on earth, it is through light that we perceive matter and time.
The artists investigate new ways of experiencing nature and ourselves in relation to it, as we come to terms with the urgency of existential and environmental crises. Their artworks oscillate between and bring awareness to, the blurred boundaries of analogue and digital, of human and artificial intelligence, of real and virtual encounters. The expanding theory of new materialism provides a useful framework in which to consider these shifts.
The idea that matter, both organic and inorganic, can shape itself and influence everything around it disrupts established hierarchies that place humans at the centre of the universe.
Like a black hole that cannot be seen but only inferred from the effect it has on its surroundings, these artworks suggest a complex entanglement of matter that avoids being fixed and is instead, always in the process of becoming.
https://mac.lakemac.com.au/Events/Shifter
Installation view: Shifter 2023 Museum of Art and Culture yapang Lake Mcquarie. Courtesy MAC yapang.