Good evening everyone. Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people, traditional owners of the land we are on. Sovereignty was never ceded.
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I’d like to thank Kiron, Sanja, Lani and Lou for the invitation to respond to DOUBT (AGAIN). I have a great admiration for you all, and your years-long affinity with each other’s practices that is played out each time you come together.
This exhibition has afforded them an opportunity to roll up their collective sleeves and inhabit, once more, together, the notion (and experience) of DOUBT. And these remarks are drawn/inspired by a conversation with the artists themselves, as they drew me so beautifully into their doubt-bubble on Zoom.
These artists engage in: the practice of doubt.
They are excited by: the material form of doubt.
And the confident embracing of uncertainty and not-knowing. If that last statement sounds contradictory, that’s good!
Because for these artists, things that may or may not be one thing or another, that are in relationship to each other, through open – possibly confounding, probably enlightening, always invigorating – dialogue, are their stock in trade. And things an also be two things at once. If this exhibition was an emoji, it would be the cry-laughing one.
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Assembling here, at Artspace at REALM for another round of DOUBT, (as they have, more than once before), they have also acted like something of a hive mind. An elite team of DOUBTers.
They haven’t come empty handed – they each have their box of tricks, something in mind, a lot to offer – but they’ve come to this gallery with open, alert collective minds:
Alert to the space, alert to each other.
Alert to opportunities to DOUBT productively. What does this look like?
Arriving at this gallery, ready to install their work, they observed its coffin-like shape, which got them thinking, responding. (Now, this is already somewhat ironic, as there’s nothing as certain as death.)
Elsewhere in the building, Lou spied some vitrines, another kind of preserving container for dead things.
Lou then worked swiftly.
She’d brought her broken-down rubber horse to the party – the horse is a recurring presence and prop in her work, so that would have been no surprise to her fellow DOUBTers – and it needed somewhere to lie. It’s right there as you enter the space, in a very strange relationship to the vitrine.
In a kind of uncontained draping, with added drapery.
As Lou has said, ‘it thinks it’s in repose’, but this idea of figurative dignity is very undermined by its two broken legs, bandaged up. That’s the kind of open-ended scenario these artists love.
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Kiron is the pinnacle of DOUBT. In his art practice, Kiron mulls over life’s deceptions, leans right into existential dread and ambiguity.
So, when Kiron mistook a cricket for a piece of fluff on the floor, it’s unsurprising that he decided to cast it in silver, replicate it, pop it on a piece of chipboard and house it adjacent to Lou’s draped horse in a vitrine far, far too grandiose for its size. He’s also brought an empty box which once housed a TV, lodging it next to Lou in a way that raises all sorts of questions about emptiness and images.
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We are now all getting a sense that there is an equal opportunity approach to this project. A mutual respect, a conversational flow. An ongoing negotiation.
So, when these artists told me that Lani claimed the back wall for her suite of photographs, and no correspondence would be entered into on the matter, I wondered for a second what that might do.
Well, it turns out that these DOUBTers are down for certainty, and they are big on trust. And when you enter the space and look down to that far wall, over and above Lou’s horse- vitrine, you see that it makes sense! We’re compelled to approach these works, pay them a visit. But when we get there, their subjects refuse us, backs turned in uncanny repetition.
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Now let’s turn our gaze to the floor.
Did anyone see the photograph, produced by an AI prompt, circulating online of the Pope wearing a white, full-length designer puffy jacket? (Balenciaga, in fact). Who believed it was him? I did.
Sanja did. And instead of quietly keeping that embarrassing lack of doubt to herself, she embraced it, and lovingly recreated designer-Pope as a maquette. His pose is an absurd conflation of kissing the ground (Pope behaviour) and downward dog (not Pope behaviour).
But wait, this poor little guy is accompanied by his very own coffin (a beautiful coffin, but a coffin nonetheless), and we’re back to thinking about the room, containers, and the only certainty we can look forward to in life, apart from taxes. Looking back up at Lani’s photographs, strips of photographic paper leaking out of their deep, black box frames, we might, without really thinking, start to sense an existential inflection, or dread.
This flow – of one work to another, one idea to others, one artist to another, things building and butting up against one another – is the delight, and work, of this show. Everything is connected here; nothing is in isolation. There is more to enjoy and grapple with than I have mentioned, and the show is an open invitation for you to enjoy and grapple with it too, because DOUBT is much more fun when it’s done with others, don’t you think? It’s the perfect show for this wonderful (existentially challenging) time of year.
Kyla McFarlane 