Terrarium @ love love studios - llewellyn

Terrarium

Kitty Horton & Michael Candy

1/10/11-23/10/11

love love studios

Installation photograph of Light Installation

The challenge for ‘emerging artists’ and art students of self-financing solo exhibitions has resulted in the majority of emerging artist’s presenting their work within the format of split or group exhibitions. Although this method of exhibiting has many favourable effects, such as increased numbers, lower costs for artists, and less egotism, the disparity between different artist’s work often highlights that which is lacking in certain work, as comparison is often an unavoidable immediate response. Michael Candy and Kitty Horton’s Terrarium, currently showing at the ARI Love Love Sudios, serves as an example of just how mediocre and trivial painting can seem in contrast with new media, as one artist’s work entirely overshadows the other.

Michael Candy is a kinetic new media artist whose practice unites kinetic sculptural objects, plants and organic matter, light and sound installation and interactivity. Utilising electricity from batteries to animate and illuminate sculptures and installations, Candy combines the organic and primordial with simple kinetic machinery, electronics, the kitsch ready-made and luminescent materials. Candy’s contribution to Terrarium consists of three major works, Fence (http://vimeo.com/29864558), the interactive sculpture Light Installation (pictured), Laser Installation (video of this can be seen on Candy’s website), and a dozen or so smaller works. In Fence, and many of the smaller works, Candy approaches reconciling the organic and the man-made with a sense of naïve romanticism, glorifying natural material and timber against subtle instances of the human magic of kineticism. Through subtle use of material and carefully placed kitsch artifacts, Candy’s machines/robots are imbued with the sentient characteristics often placed in dichotomy against the mechanical and automated. The delicacy of plant life and a sense of wilderness in combination with technology and electrically driven movement present in these works reflects a Japanese science fiction oeuvre, seemingly referencing the aesthetic evident in Hayao Miyazaki films or post-apocalyptic, environmental utopian visions.

Candy’s Light Installation, as seen in the image above, reacts to sound through a microphone and computerized circuit at the base of the sculpture, circulating a proportionate amount of electricity to the volume of sound surrounding the sculpture through its globular clusters of light bulbs. The illumination which results from this connotes an anthropomorphosis of the sculpture, its rhythmic pulse mimicking the biological functions of animal life such as breath and heart beat. The subsequent radiant warmth emanating from these intentionally organic looking clusters adds to the illusion of life within the structure, the object responding to aural interaction and thus imitating sentience. Laser Installation consists of a collection of ten coloured lasers, positioned around the room to reflect off of ten wall mounted dental mirrors, with each laser’s reflected end point coinciding on a plastic tea cup pot plant, filled with clear plastic rocks and housing a small cactus plant. Adding to this laser-sphere, Enigmatic Rock utilizes an old sewing machine to rotate a rough piece of amber, at which two lasers are projected. As the roughly shaped, semi-transparent rock rotates, refraction within and penetration of the laser light upon the surface of the piece of amber deviate. These works show a particularly sophisticated glorification of material, the lasers in both instances illuminating the combination of the organic and the synthetic not to clarify their relationship but to saturate it with illusion and mysticism.

Adjacent to Candy’s minor works, Kitty Horton presented a collection of small, approximately 15cm x 15cm paintings on board. Horton’s paintings were restricted to decorative abstract patterning on flat colour backgrounds, the content and rendering in paint staying consistent in her twenty-five or so works. The immediate sensationalist nature of Candy’s kinetic installations when presented next to these flat, graphic and inert paintings left Horton’s work appearing superficial and derivative. What potentially could have been a competent series of paintings was made to seem like shallow illustration, joining the painfully large body of existing cutesy, delicate, decorative painting work one is likely to see on a clothing store’s shop window or a fifteen-year-old’s blog.

http://michaelcandy.com/