REVIEWS
15.04.14
Source: Meredith Birrell, The Art Life
https://theartlife.com.au/2014/15-02-14/
Someone once said that when you enter an art gallery, you are, figuratively speaking, entering a director’s living room. In the case of Home@735, you are literally stepping into the living room of gallerist Anthony Bautovich and artist Madeleine Preston, who last year opened a gallery in their own home. This is an intimate and refreshing gallery space that is all the more welcoming for its minuteness.
I recently saw their latest show featuring recent art graduates from COFA, SCA and the National Art School. It comprises painting, video, photography, installation and ceramics. What could be a crowded assortment of objects is handled very well in the limited space available and the directors have thought a lot about the flow-through of the space and the deliberate placing of an object to offset another.
... Frankie Chow and Hespe are the two artists featured downstairs. Both artists’ work creates a sense of familiarity; Hespe’s for its use of the generic snapshot and Chow’s for the intimacy of her video performance.
... Intimate and odd in a different way is Chow’s video work Split (2013). Chow’s face intently gazes at us and each time she blinks, a split-second flash of her naked body appears, then we return to the focussed internalised watching. The subliminal images are like those momentary flashes in our own heads, the fragments of memories, sensations and images that make up our internal world. Chow has talked of her interest in camgirl culture, a genre of homemade internet pornography that has led her to explore the fissures between the aesthetics of desire and sexuality (in this case, self-defined) and the social realities of isolation and trauma as experienced in time and through memory. It is an intense piece that unwittingly involves you in its act of voyeurism and is so elegantly simple in its execution that at first you are not aware of your own complicity.
Photo credit: Home@735
