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Metro, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 July 2000 Broad-MindedJames Powditch's flat sculptures, made from wood, metal and found objects, invent a new language, writes SEBASTIAN SMEE On the strength of just two solo shows in a couple of years, James Powditch must rate as one of the most talented young artists in Sydney. Ostensibly, he's a sculptor, but his works — most of which hang on walls — combine painting, assemblage and architecture. They're brilliantly inventive, full of delightful surprises, but tightly structured and organised, too: the impression you get is of a guy who is not just good at making things in a this-goes-with-that, free-associative sort of way, but at thoroughly thinking them through. One thing making Powditch unusual is his penchant for finding inspiration in a given source and pursuing it through dozens of works. All the works in his last show, for instance, were responses to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. The new show is called Widescreen, and the works in it are riffs on various movies you may or may not have heard of: Zabriskie Point, The Cars That Ate Paris, Blow Up, Parallax View and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Straight off, such ambitious subject matter recommends Powditch. Sculptors who work in his materials — wood, metal, found and weathered objects of every variety — are often attracted to the genre out of low-level nostalgia. They're cut off, you can't help feeling, from the real world of whooshing communications and white noise, preferring instead a wistful existence of garage sales and shell-collecting. But Powditch gives off no such impression: his intelligence is too clean and precise, his inventions too natty, and his inspiration — in this case, film — too adamantly up-to-date (even if some of those films aren't exactly latest releases). The format of all but one of these works — as the title suggests — is wide, like a movie screen. Although they hang on walls, there is a lot of depth to them, for Powditch builds up form and incident with devious ingenuity. One red, blue and yellow-dappled work, The Manchurian Candidate, is composed of — among other things — weathered wood with Chinese and English characters inscribed on it, and then, over to the right and set several centimetres in, a piece of ornately carved wood on a piece of cloth with stars on it ... worlds within worlds. Powditch has invented a brilliant new sculptural language with which to read film's familiar, always seductive codes — and it sets sparks flying. He is so good at making things, so unfettered in the way he chooses to make them, that you feel he could do whatever he wants and make it succeed. Widescreen by James Powditch, at Dickerson Gallery until July 23. |