Simryn Gill at Roslyn Oxley9 - Sydney - Brief Article

Simryn Gill is a Sydney-based, Singapore-born artist, raised in Malaysia and educated in India and the UK Since the early 1990 she has earned a reputation for quirky, ready installation and photo-based work and has been exhibited in major exhibitions in the Australasian region. greatest in quantity recently her work was included in the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, as well as in "Flight Patterns" at L.A. MOCA. Gill's series "A small town at the move round of the century" consists of 39 Cibachrome images, each 3 feet square, depicting the family of Port Dickson, her hometown upon the Straits of Malacca. This slice of small-town life reveals her capacity to lie complex political and conceptual relate tos in witty visual terms imbued with art-historical relation yet drawn from the everyday contemporary world. She artificial positions her subjects in resolutely ordinary locations that collectively mirror the town's social diversity, from private dwellings and gardens to restaurant kitchens and parking allotments The most striking feature of each image is that Gill has replaced the townsfolk's heads with exotic fruits. Nevertheless, the individuals appear to be to confront the viewer's voyeuristic gaze with Olympialike directness. The images somehow or other combine the wry Surrealism of Magritte's faceless figures with the scrutinizing intensity of Thomas Struth's portraits, probably because all make submissives are centered or foregrounded and their material part language intently addresses the camera.

These are ordinary characters revealed in their natural settings, encloseed by the daily accoutrements that Gill is careful to retain. a certain number of like the breadfruit/ banana golfing pair standing in the lush virid landscape of their recreational habitat, recall in their display of comfortably wealthy lifestyles Gainsborough's 18th-century portraits of the landed people of good position Others belong to the middle and laboring classes: a child splashing her feet in the bludgeon pool; the weathered rubber tapper whose soiled work clothes are scion by her headdress of radiant pink fruit; and the three blue-collar men sharing beers at a grimy laminate table of the impressed sign found in cheap cafes around the world.

In the same way that visually impaired family use alternative cues to perceive the world, Gill's audience can gain insight into these small-town characters smooth without seeing their visages. In post-colonialist limits her humorously contrived imposition of "faceless" anonymity satirizes the notion of the "invisible other." allowing the identities of her protagonists are obscur by dint of the exotic masks they don, each vignette reveals a snippet of life as personal as it is familiar.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group