Reviewer: Peter Haynes

The In Between is a visual treatise on the relationships established between young women living in shared domestic spaces. The images are (apart from one, Cat. 3) of two women in, mostly, poses of inactivity or even boredom. It is as though they have been captured in a moment in between activity; the before or after of an unstated narrative or the pause in an uniterated dialogue. There is a sort of tension between the protagonists throughout the images, a tension that imparts a pervasive prurience as if the viewer has interrupted an intimate and personal moment.

Bishop asks the viewer to move around the exhibition in the manner in which she places the images in random fashion on the walls and floor of the gallery space. This mannerism may work for some and indeed it was a persuasive ploy in moving the viewer through the exhibition returning back and forth to the various works. For me it was a bit tricky and an unnecessary impost in digesting the thrust of the pictorial narrative. The artist also used text as an intermediary between images. The texts were framed and had therefore a visual as much as a verbal role. In one sense they filled in for the unstated narratives of the pictures.

The images themselves are characterised by moments of intimacy, of shared activity of mute dialogue; played out in undistinguished domestic settings that speak of transition, of the nomadic life often a part of young lives no longer in the family home nor yet in a position to establish their own. The viewer as voyeur is perhaps present but perhaps it is more viewer as interested onlooker. Bishop's images work well. The carefully structured compositions allied with the crisp colour are insinuative and quietly embracing. I am not convinced, however, by the idiosyncratic placement of works. I think I know why the artist has adopted this trope but it remains an unnecessary inclusion for me.

Karena Keys' Break It Up is an installation that "deepens (the artist's) exploration of paint and its relationship to space and the body". The installation is made up of a number of elements including a digital animation, several sculptural pieces, pillows, textiles and other smaller objects. One enters the space through a black curtain and is confronted with a concatenation of gold, sound, sheer curtains, a theatrical amalgamation that is at once enticing and disturbing, and in which the viewer is surrounded by and immersed in the total environment. A series of wrapped "bodies" are objects of introversion, introspection and constraint. They are also imbued with a state of immanence, of something about to happen (but not while the viewer is present). The installation is dominated by the animation in which throbbing "blobs" of gold pulsate in and out of the pictorial surface in unrestrained activity – a clear contrast to the stolidity of the floor-based pieces but a strong indication of the future possibilities invested in these.

In the catalogue essay it states that Keys "is interested in the impossibility of paint stepping outside the bounds of its materiality". The essay also provides descriptions of the artist's making processes. These textual accompaniments offer ways into Keys' complex conceptual bases but the work itself in all its component parts declares (albeit metaphorically) possibilities, the elision of opposites, of constraint and release, of surface and internalised forces. Break It Up's complexity is related to its esoteric theoretical starting-point. The latter, however, does not obfuscate its aesthetic depth.