Context

Timeslots explores the reconfiguration of painting through perceptions of temporality. Phenomena such as aurorae borealis, astronomy, and film are some of the sources of the investigation in the multi-panel installation. Three painting installations are featured in the exhibition at Spencer St Gallery in Melbourne: Unreeling & Orb, Two Reflections, and Timeslots.

Unreeling & Orb hurls itself across its long and narrow canvases. The first panel, Orb, plays on the illusions of the nocturnes and romantic landscape painting, as well as supernovae and microscopic organisms to create a sense of suspense. Its partner, Unreeling, features an accelerated light force rocketing across the surface like a land-bound comet.

The twin paintings of Two Reflections creates an immersion in the light and spectacle of an aurora borealis, also an event that seems to observers to be suspended in time.

The third work in the exhibition is Timeslots, an installation of 28 narrow vertical painted panels, or "slots". Each painting is divided in two: the lower part a band of black, representing a film strip, while the upper section is rendered as a sequence of abstracted landscape.

Unfolding across the sequence, the smeared and streaked paint alludes to the cinematic effect of the motion blur. The slots could also be the view of a landscape seen speeding by from the window of a train. In both cases, the frame cannot contain the time that slips past.

Time Projects