Arryn Snowball at Heiser

Undone 13 September – 8 October

Arryn Snowball

Heiser Gallery

Undone is the latest commercial presentation of the doctoral work of Queensland College of Art tutor Arryn Snowball. Showing through Heiser Gallery in the art precinct of Fortitude Valley, Snowball’s Undone brings together three of his more saleable series of work from this year, his synonym antonym series, a photographic series of sticks and shadows, and a collection of his steam paintings.

In his synonym antonym series, Snowball examines the fluidity of language, charting the progression of a word from its synonym, to the synonym of its synonym, and so on, until it reaches the antonym of the original word. This linear progression is printed on fine translucent paper, with the inverse progression faintly visible underneath printed on a corresponding sheet. The effect of this layering pairs the beginning and end points of the vertical linear progression with a juxtaposition of word and antonym, with the intensity of distance in meaning of subsequent words decreasing until the middle, where the two centre words are identical. In this wordplay, Snowball explores the relationship of meaning and contradiction, the viewer approaching the translucent and ephemeral sheets of paper and dictating the text of the work as if it was a romantic piece of spoken prose.

Steam 9, Arryn Snowball, 2011

Similarly, Snowball’s photographic series of stick objects and their shadows again challenge conceptions of truth, perceptions of objective sensory knowledge, and representations of reality. Here Snowball has constructed three-dimensional shapes out of small black rectangular-prism-sticks. Placing these shapes in a spaceless white vacuum, and using varying projections of directional light, Snowball documents the relationship between the object and the shadows it casts, the photographs bleeding together the pure black object and its counterpart pure black shadow to break down the solidity of the perception of the object.

It is within Snowball’s steam paintings however, where the romance and subtlety of this challenge to objective truth is most effectively articulated. Again working with photography, Snowball documents the visual appearance of steam captured on a digital camera against a vacuous black background. Using these photographs as loose stimulus, Snowball recreates the appearance of steam through large-scale oil paintings, detailing the soft unfolding contours of light and colour that can be drawn from perceiving the phenomenon of steam.

Considering these three series of work, the title Undone seems an appropriate summation of the intent behind these works, Snowball seemingly documenting the unravelling of that which is deemed concrete and infallible. Often this challenge to reason and perception as absolute truth is coupled with a championing of the chaotic and absurd. To his credit Snowball replaces these with a glorification of the romance of subtlety and transience, leaving a sense of delicate beauty as opposed to illustrated nihilism.

Llewellyn