Underwater Abstraction: Dr onacloV
ANCA Gallery, 1 Rosevear Place, Dickson.
Until February 12.
Reviewer: Charity Smith
The role of art in exploring beauty and teaching truth has long been established. That art can also illuminate ideologies, communicating social or political agendas, is one of its more complicated powers.
When the work of art seeks to alter the thinking of its audience, it is venturing into a realm of influence that can be as subtle as the hint of truth or as blunt as overt propaganda.
Dr onacloV is a lecturer in visual art at the University of Sydney. A painter and accidental photographer, a teacher and interdisciplinary collaborater, she has been exploring environmental issues through her art for the past 15 years.
In purely visual terms, Underwater Abstraction is a lovely exhibition. Her paintings are one element of her response to seeing corals spawning. A collaborative expedition to One Tree and Lizard islands with marine biologist Erika Woolsey, took onacloV underwater to photograph coral reefs. The resulting canvases are colourful evocations of this submarine world, a world filled with interweaving and overlapping vermilion, turquoise, cobalt and pitch. Across the surfaces the artist has stippled patterned dots, representing the patterns cast by the light on the corals.
onacloV's photographs capture an ethereal beauty, the legs of anonymous swimmers twisting in an ultramarine sea. The photographs were taken incidentally, as onacloV describes it, ''it was a serendipitous moment'' when she was out to film the corals and became interested in capturing the figures within the seascape. The images evoke the visual vocabulary of Henson and Viola in their saturated tones and frozen movements.
onacloV's work is pure and seemingly straightforward, colour and form combining to form lyrical and appealing surfaces.
There is, however, another element at play here, an implicit narrative carried in the beauty of her imagery. onacloV is committed to promoting the potential in marrying art and science. The ability of art to communicate the truths of science on a visceral level is a passion of her practice. The aim of Underwater Abstraction is to raise awareness of climate change within the Great Barrier Reef, drawing attention to rising water temperatures and the effects of pollution.
This didactic agenda is never overt in the works; rather it is articulated in supporting materials. The political implications of the scientific message will be drawn out more explicitly in the accompanying contributions from the marine biologists, sound artists and interaction designers working in collaboration with onacloV when these works are displayed at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2013.
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