GEOMETRIC NATURE

Friday 15 August - Sunday 21 September 2008
Curator: Lucy Hawthorne
Artists: Dean Chatwin, David Keeling, David Martin, Anne Mestitz and Amanda Shone

Geometric Nature showcased a number of three- and two-dimensional artworks that used geometry to represent and/or interpret the natural environment.

For artists today, the landscape genre provides a challenge:  How does one visually represent the natural environment?  The intense relationship we have with the environment and the constructs imposed on the landscape means that it is not simply enough to attempt to recreate it figuratively. 

Our relationship with nature is a contradictory one.  We are dependent on it for our survival, we were born out of it and will rot in it when we die, yet we have a history of trying to control nature, fearing, loathing and conquering it.  We build monuments in honour of it or defiance of it, we worship it but also destroy it, we build over it and then try to imitate the natural landscape in our individual backyards.  So while the exhibition title is immediately recognisable for its contradiction in terms, the works in this exhibition illustrate the way in which geometry and its associations can express the contradictions that lie in this relationship between humans and the environment.

Lucy Hawthorne was the recipient of the Tasmanian Emerging Curator Fund which is administered by CAST.  The funding will assist the curator in the research phase of the project. 

Geometric Nature, Catalogue

David Keeling, 1997, Art Will Conquer Nature: Picnic in Arcadia (detail)  oil on canvas, 112 x 76cm	Anne Mestitz, 2007 The sky is falling powder coated aluminium and vinyl tape, 100 x 300 x 300cm
Amanda Shone, 2008, Cross-currents and Deep Holes, glass fish tanks, river rocks, water, electric pumps and wooden table, dimensions variable	David Martin, 2003, Today, fulitrans, Perspex, fluoro lights in MDF box-frame, 150 x 150 cm