The Sydney Morning Herald 6th  May 1999

Space Shuttle

by Sebastian Smee

The lastest show at Newtown's architectural gallery has a lesson for interior designers, writes Sebastian Smee.

It's the dream of every pinched-purse property owner to have a spell that dematerialises walls. Not all walls - just certain ones. Because they do get in the way, don't they? Walls are the only thing stopping a cottage from becoming a castle.

As it happens, an art gallery in Newtown called Level Gallery has enlisted the imaginative telents of eight artists, with backgrounds in architectural model-making, set design, props-making and architecture, to explore the strange or mystical hurdy-grudy of dematerialising walls.

Artistically, it's a terrific show, given a special edge by the obvious inventive spatial intelligence behind each of the works. Interior designers take note.

The show is called Implant. Its curator, Jas Hugonnet, studied architecture and Level Gallery, which he runs, tends to show work that relates, even if only obliquely, to architecture.

Hugonnet set the rules for Implant: five 3-D works from each artist that seek to "dematerialise the surface — either coming out of it or going beyond it".

I met Hugonnet in the gallery the day the works came in. The opening was the next night. He said he was mildly surprised, but gratified, by the results. Some artists, he said, had interpreted the theme rather loosely. But as he walked around he seemed tickeled pink — as if their inventiveness was still dawning on him.

It's still dawning on me, too. Neil McKenzie, an architect and painter, has made an intriguing set of five pieces. Essentially they're little boxes, painted the same white as the wall, fastened to it at around eye level. On one side of each box McKenzie has drawn a window ledge and — as if seen through the illusory window — little scenes (titles such as Sinister Kingswood and Nude Ladies should give you the idea). Your eye is subtly conned into thinking it's in an entirely new space.

James Powditch has taken another, more substantive, approach. He has affixed a beautifully curving 3-D ledge to the wall, with five long boxes that can be pulled out of  it like drawers. Inside the drawers is a hotch-potch of funny stuff: a  power point and a segment of wall crumbling away to reveal a phone bug (Bugs is the title of the work), a pianola roll, typewriter keys, and the parts of an old telephone. It's a work that suggests voyeurism, old Hitchcock films and secret, mysterious spaces.

John Nicholson has a wild and wacky work that consists of the letter "A", "R" and "T" hanging loopily off the wall, and two cords with plugs thrusting out of the wall like electrified snakes. All the parts are widely spaced out - in fact, one of the plugs is on another wall.

Hugonnet, an artist himself, also has work in the show, along similar (spatial) lines. He has five fish — or parts thereof — disappearing into or coming out of the wall. One protruding segment of wall actually has a fish cutting through a corner. Like most of the works in the show, it's a visual gag wittier in the flesh than on the page.

Brian Nagle's Kronos has used on oblique-angled corner of the gallery to mount an ingenious installation. He has sandblasted the designs of various time-telling mechanisms, from Stonehenge to Copernicus's solar system, onto glass planes.

Perhaps most extraordinary are Lionel Bawden's sculptures made from pencils glued together, then carved into smooth-edged shapes. Curiouser and curiouser. Mark Collier and Annabel Butler have also come up with ingenious works.

Implant is a great idea: it gives the whole gallery a distinctly uncanny feel — and it might give you some ideas for space creation beyond just smoke and mirrors.