Rose Nolan
Why Do We Do The Things We Do

The sec­ond of Art­space’s series of solo exhi­bi­tions encom­pass­ing all the gallery spaces was a mul­ti-faceted project instal­la­tion of recent and new works by Mel­bourne-based artist Rose Nolan — the most ambi­tious and com­pre­hen­sive pre­sen­ta­tion of her work ever under­tak­en in Sydney.

Rose Nolan traf­fics in forms, codes and ideals found­ed in and so also con­stant­ly ref­er­enc­ing back to utopi­an strands of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry avant-gardism. Rang­ing from artist books and mul­ti­ples through to large-scale floor works, wall paint­ings and ban­ners — joined in this exhi­bi­tion also by pho­tographs, mov­ing image and found object works — Nolan’s prac­tice seeks to exam­ine the com­plex­i­ty of art objects (mate­ri­als, scale, con­tent, process, his­to­ry) and the ways in which such objects can both trans­form and be trans­formed by the spaces in which they are placed and by their rela­tion­ship to the viewer.

Work­ing with­in the pic­to­r­i­al tra­di­tion of abstract and non-objec­tive paint­ing, Nolan’s ongo­ing project encom­pass­es var­i­ous areas of enquiry: for exam­ple, text as mate­r­i­al object; the author­i­ty of his­to­ry; and the expe­ri­ence of the pro­vi­sion­al. It also finds con­tent in the lega­cies of art his­to­ry, in par­tic­u­lar ear­ly mod­ernism via Russ­ian con­struc­tivism, Male­vich and Duchamp link­ing to Sol Lewitt and 1960s con­cep­tu­al art. As Nolan states: ​‘With a dis­tance afford­ed through time, geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion, cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence and per­son­al con­text, works are open to a vari­ety of inter­pre­ta­tions. There is an ingen­u­ous and play­ful slip­page in which the gap between an his­tor­i­cal con­text and my cur­rent expe­ri­ence cre­ates a space for inter­pre­ta­tions to be con­found­ed. Through the use of par­tic­u­lar mate­ri­als (paint, ​“found” card­board, paper, wood, text, a lim­it­ed palette of red and white) derived from an inter­est in the every­day, the frag­ile and the pro­vi­sion­al, ref­er­ences to the past are re-con­tex­u­alised in a new form. Sim­ple modes of con­struc­tion dis­rupt expec­ta­tion leav­ing the view­er to pon­der ques­tions of val­ue and craft.’

Rose Nolan’s work brush­es the hero­ic ges­tures of utopi­an mod­ernism with the inti­ma­cies and foibles of the personal.

Art­space acknowl­edges the assis­tance of Anna Schwartz Gallery, Aus­tralia, in the real­i­sa­tion of the project.

Curat­ed by Blair French and Robert Leonard