So remember the liquid ground by Brianna Speight / In some delicate oblique way by Dani Reynolds
Brianna Speight
Brianna Speight is an emerging artist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, working with photography and installation. Her work explores personal histories and power structures through a post-human feminist perspective. Grounded in surreal techniques, her photographs are non-linear and feature layered compositions that entwine materials with the human form, focusing on revealing emotion and ambiguity. Speight holds a Bachelor of Visual Art in Photography (2016) and an Honours degree (2017) from the University of South Australia. Recent residencies and exhibitions include George Street Studios (2023) and the British School at Rome residencies (2022), both supported by the Helpmann Academy; Real Memories (2022) at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf; Adelaide X (2021) at POP Gallery, HEATWAVE (2021) at West Gallery, ZINC (2020) at Praxis ARTspace and Sauerbier House Cultural Exchange and Body Writing (2019) at Floating Goose Gallery. Speight was a Co-Director at FELTspace from 2020 to 2021 and currently works part-time at Flinders University Museum of Art.
We might think of light as the space between two eternal darknesses, an existence of shine. As the backdrop against which life unfolds, this light is capable of taking the shape of whatever can contain - a mouth, a mirror, an abalone shell. This now abandoned abode, turned bowl, receptacle, pool. From here, the light reflects and refracts towards, onto, away. In so-called Australia, it is easy to imagine life as an endless flare. As we traverse stolen land, speeding along the bitumen circulatory system of the country, we are confronted by a shimmer. Pools of water appear in the distance, only to disappear upon our approach. To the side of the road, an expanse of salinity yawns back at the gaping sky. Here, water appears—or appears to appear. Space and heat are corralled by light in a conspiracy to reanimate the long-gone watery spirit of the interior. The shimmer is the marker of their communication; a conduit, as packets of energy ripple across, amidst and in between, shaping the manufacture and receipt of matter in all its combinatory forms— a spectrum of visible and non-visible.
The late environmental philosopher Deborah Bird Rose recognises the shimmer as a sign of life, understandings drawn from Yolŋu ancestral knowledge which challenge Western human exceptionalism, displaced in favour of fluid, responsive, lively and deep recognitions of entanglement. Our world is a scaffold for light, a potential for shimmering. We might then think of distance in our world as an opening or a passage for light to pass through, cross, encounter and illuminate. Under the blinding sun, there is space for the shimmer to occur. Heat and light ripple and radiate, alerting us to the presence of a watery or once-watery body. What might it mean, however, if this light occurs in a more considered manner—say through the lens of a camera, the flash of a bulb? What might it mean if this light is deployed towards the divination of those watery and once-watery bodies?
The controlled seepage of light, disciplined and deployed through the architecture of the camera, gives rise to an image held and made still in time and through this, the reflective and revelatory nature of light is exposed within the space of Speight’s work. Whilst leakage is often avoided within a photographic context, given as it is to the distortion and flooding of images, here it is embraced as a manifestation of porosity. The aperture as multiple enables the seep to permeate these images; its lights are multidirectional and the resulting images are made multiple, kaleidoscopic and shimmering in matter and meaning. In this space, quantum truths are made manifest: Speight invites us to reckon with the knowledge that “both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality” and what that might mean for seeping, shimmering, porous bodies.
In thinking porously, we become sensitive to the fragile and permeable nature of the boundaries that separate us from the world. Rosi Braidotti alerts us to the connective potential of the alveoli, that the act of breathing is an act of welcoming the world into the body. Similarly, Astrida Neimanis acknowledges the inter-implication of whales, rain clouds, toxic seas and watery, warm human bodies. Through an enmeshment of body, matter, and ecology, Speight’s images emerge as sites of porous connectivity, building responsive sites from which fraught arid and watery ecologies might trouble our conceptions of where we end and where the world begins. An attunement to the mutability of these boundaries leads us to an attentiveness to the interplay of light on surface, be it the abalone, the salt flat or the bitumen, and asks us: is the shimmer a sign of life or merely a trick of the light?
How the light gets in by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse
Chantelle Mitchell is a researcher, curator and writer leveraging fragmentary and archival approaches to address structure and place in ecological frames. Jaxon Waterhouse is a writer, publisher and arts worker exploring greening philosophy and seeking new ways to talk about the natural world and our place within it. Together, Chantelle and Jaxon work under the auspices of Ecological Gyre Theory, a long term collaborative research project.
Brianna Speight, Think Quick Sand, 2023, sublimation print on aluminium, 38x28cm.
Dani Reynolds
Dani Reynolds (b.1989) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of absurdity and sincerity. Their creative process utilises ‘not knowing’ and failure as desirable states from which to develop new work. Experimentation, humour and collaboration are key to the development of paintings, sculpture, performance and moving images. Reynolds completed First Class Honours at Victoria College of Arts in 2016. Reynolds’ recent exhibitions and performances include World's Widest Wig Work, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, 2022; Trade-off, KINGS ARI, FELTspace, and Watch This Space, 2021/22; Emile Zile and No Clients Fair Exchange for National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Art Book Fair, 2019; Field Theory’s ICON at Federation Square, 2018; Canine Choreography, Next Wave’s Kickstart Helix Program, 2017, and Next Wave Festival, 2018; and Come What May (with Mallory Allen), Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, 2017.
Give or take: The unwieldy limbs of self-care and support
Dani Reynolds’ practice is a Sisyphean one. One that “operates according to a cycle of failure and repetition, of non-attainment and replay; [one that] is a punctuated performance. A rule is drawn. An action is required. An attempt is made. Over and over, again and again.” [1]
Here, the rule drawn was twofold: make a painting; replicate a garden statue. The actions as well: paint; mould. Attempts were multiple, failed, and repeated— over and over, again and again. Yet, rather than considering this setting oneself up for failure as a pity party, Dani invites us to imagine failure as a way of refuting dominant goal oriented ideology. How? Through a choreographing of ambivalence. The space is thus a partition of said ambivalence, and the repeated gestures, a series of rehearsals, as we’re thrown for a Sisyphean loop.
There’s something lingering, hesitating in Dani’s work, a kind of drawn out gesticulation before an eventual final act. Like a metabolic process. The artist’s obsession for a handmade Pekingese dog lawn statue in their neighbourhood led to a deal with a garden manager for a temporary loan of the masterpiece— a catalyst for the artist to learn moulding techniques formerly foreign to them. The replication and repetition reveal themselves then both as attempts at attaining the imperfect handmade mini-monument, and as ways of avoiding any fixed, dictated notion of what it is. This monumental ambivalence sneaks its way into Dani’s large-scale paintings as well. Hanging from up-right metal structures, the canvases are not only extracted from a canonical history of painting, but also transformed into bearers of other images. Small photographs of objects and situations— they, too, ambivalent— encrust themselves on the backs of the paintings, doubling their nature.
Although adorned with an unclear status, the paintings are not to be considered as failures, but rather as supports of ambivalence that document that very feeling: their surfaces bare traces of figuration that disappear behind successive layers of unsureness. “Something scratched out or scribbled over = willful act of erasure, anger, negation, disgust, hate; embarrassment, shame, or a wish to make invisible or to obliterate,” wrote Amy Sillman. [2] The scribbling here may be a willful act of erasure, but rather than solely being understood as done in negation, it reveals the ambivalence necessary to navigating an incoherent world, and the beauty of existing in multiple ways. [3] Dani Reynolds’ Sisyphean choreography can thus be read as a way of flirting with bathos— or comically failed attempts at presenting artistic greatness— in some delicate oblique way.
Katia Porro
Katia Porro is a curator, writer and translator. She is currently the director of In extenso (Clermont Ferrand, France) and the magazine La Belle Revue.
[1] Emma Cocker, “Over and Over, Again and Again,” in Documents of Contemporary Art: Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre, London, Whitechapel, 2010, p. 154.
[2] Amy Sillman, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, Paris, After 8 books, 2022, p.113.
[3] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.
Dani Reynolds, Untitled, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180x200mm. Image: Thomas McCammon.
