catalogue essay by Katrina Simmons
for exhibition 'agglomeration' at CUBE, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, July-August 2007
semi-detached sugar hit
the agglomeration looms out of the darkened exhibition space as if it were the problem-pony in the family of Callum Morton cool. A deshabille structure that leans more towards J.G. Ballard’s unravelled High Rise, Sarah crowEST’s modernist shantytown has trouble with lichen and other oddities that adhere amongst its exposed wiring and box-like forms. Mainly it has little windows lit up for the viewer to peer into, little LCD screens that warm like fires drawing you in as witness to the kooky and sometimes dark narratives that unfold.
At one portal odd swaying creatures with hugely distended heads accumulate one by one; although alien in appearance they seem benign and strangely comforting. On another screen a wide-eyed woman tries to claw her way up dimly-lit stairs, caught in a blurry, rolling struggle, she appears delusional, or in some kind of endless bad dream. You imagine that others in the ‘building’ may be unaware that she is lost. You move on not sure what you can do.
19. I have this feeling there was more going on than meets the eye. I went around to her house once and there were signs of a scuffle. Nothing was said.
Another woman appears on several of the miniature screens, her severe black bob, black-framed glasses and white lab-style coat easily identifies her. With fixed red lips she seems efficient and productive, busily carrying out certain ‘experiments’. Initially, these appear banal but soon a kind of perversity presents itself, as in one task where she attempts to consume an entire chocolate cake in one sitting. Pleasure and delight progress incrementally towards an uncomfortable self-enforced nausea as each slice is painstakingly downed. It is awkward, disconcerting and masochistic. Poise is hard to maintain and she knows it, her smile is sickly.
Elsewhere in crowEST’s structure ‘lab woman’ is seen gluing together orange-sized papier-mâché balls into two towers. Pisa style, they lean precariously and as the towers grow beyond her height and the perimeter of the screen, there is the sure knowledge that they must, at some point, collapse and fall. The viewer hovers in anticipation of the inevitable. The woman in question works on smugly, regardless. Through the intimacy of another screen we see her again, this time lost in reverie producing papier-mâché balls like a dreamy automaton, her thoughts occasionally interrupted by a ‘mini-me’ version of herself enacting out a karate style routine.
3. Stiff and starchy is how I would describe her. Miserable. Although twice I caught her smiling to herself which suggested some kind of amusing inner life.
Appearing as part faded Melrose Place apartment block, part Willy Wonka factory, the agglomeration seems to present a visual ‘working through’ of operational processes, a wadded together framework for enacting mythologies of the self as artist. Unashamedly self-referential, crowEST appears as the protagonist and inhabitant of this sprawling edifice and invites the viewer in with a goofy warmth and humour that is darkly tinged rather than grim. Stemming directly from projects initiated as part of the artist’s recently completed Masters degree at the University of South Australia, the work is a culmination of her research into the function of the alter-ego in contemporary arts practice. For crowEST the making is where it is all at and the agglomeration digs deep into the absurdity, compulsions and other sticky fears evident in the artist’s prolific output, which includes the creation of multiple ‘creatures’, structures, performances, videos, and film.
Economy too is evident as crowEST’s materials consist of scrappy bits of timber, paper, glue, fabric, paint, glitter, and a few props, in a recent conversation she reiterates how it is important “to use what I have already got”. Her skill lies in the spontaneity of each work’s execution, her ability to keep things fresh looking, mistakes are rarely, if ever, edited out. Her videos, along with her creatures, though skilfully made and apparently ‘finished’, are endless permutations of a tensely held oddness. On one of the seven screens we see the maker/artist in the process of creating her spooky little creatures, quickly cutting out, stuffing, sewing and painting. With her movements heightened by the film’s exaggerated speed she appears quite manic and there is almost a crazed aspect to her labour. The large scissors she uses appear oversized for the task, more like shears, cartoonish but menacing. She might go crazy and cut other things, her long hair could be a target. A black cat wanders repeatedly over her worktable.
31. Well, strangely she flourished in the midst of dislocation and could comfortably dwell in disorder.
Not necessarily a coherent or even factual portrait, the agglomeration gladly swells our preconceptions of the personae of the artist as self aware rather than self obsessed. There is a willingness in this work to embrace the potential that Anita Phillips has spoken of in A Defence of Masochism, the understanding that “Some kinds of knowledge come from outside, from spaces of exile. Sometimes thoughts seem to come from somewhere that consciousness would like to disown.” crowEST instinctively heads towards discomfort or absurdity, recognising it as a generative tool for inspiration. She sets up ideas as armature that allows for the work to come into being raw, rather than emulating contemporary forms of slickness. It is all puttied together really, as one big agglomeration. This shonky, mock-modernist apparatus, however propositional, has at its core, a strength that comes from the uncompromising intent of the artist herself, a truly driven need to make and a refusal to accept the limitations of a certain kind of self, artistic or otherwise.
Katrina Simmons
Katrina Simmons is an Adelaide based artist, writer and lecturer, currently undertaking a studio-based PhD that speculates on the generative potential of failure.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ken Bolton's catalogue essay for 'sarah crowEST! get rid of yourself!' at the EAF, 2005
Sarah CrowEST’s work has for some time manifested as a preoccupation with the Other, the alien, figuring it as bodily presence and as another subjectivity weighted equally with the spectator’s. An exhibition of some years ago at Downtown gallery showed vaguely sugar-almond shapes, ranging from about a foot or so to maybe fifteen centimetres in height. These were housed in chains of adjoining cubicles that the viewer stood over to peer into from above. Imprisoned within, these figures were variously seen to be sleeping, bored or in despair; numbly ‘seated’, curled in corners; or trying to scale the walls—to escape or join others. Some, like pet animals (jerbils, guinea pigs) had pooed their cages. The work risked being cute you would think, hearing it described, but it was not. The sense it gave off was of enormous ennui and frustration—creatures literally ‘climbing the walls’—of time dragging slowly, of tragedy. The viewer was able to smile at the creatures’ cuteness—but their pain censured this. One felt great sympathy. And perhaps the ‘cuteness’ stands in for the colourful charm often attributed to other cultures: CrowEST has us attribute it and see that we have done so, caught out as patronising, smugly dehumanising—or able to see the reflex that way and move beyond it.
CrowEST’s current projection-pieces employ a development of some of these same strategies, worked up over time and through sorties into the performance area over the last few years.
The works deal with body-image and with anxieties as to beauty, attractiveness, acceptability. The alien featured is to us, I think, quite beautiful: strikingly ice-cream white, with dramatically wide-set and elegant eyes, tiny mouth, no nose: features of the stylization that cartoons use (perhaps especially relevantly, Manga cartoons) to make their characters cute, feminized and childlike, or cute-ly child-like. Seeing such an irresistible ‘alien’ disfiguring itself in an effort to ‘join the club’ is rather heartbreaking, painful even. We want to intervene, allay its fears, disavow any perceived superiority in ourselves.
The creature does great harm to itself, aside from the distress it seems to feel already over its self-image. It is driven, helpless not to go on, in a frenzy of self-punishment and self-mutilation.
These works of CrowEST’s are focused here more on the issue of women’s alienation from their own bodies, that of Western women most particularly. However, the same mechanisms in the work generate a like critique and set of responses in the viewer: we see the figure as already beautiful and the disfigurement as distressing and shocking—and can do nothing to prevent it. (In this I am reminded of Mike Parr’s strategies in many performance works, both recent and from the early 70s.)
It is painful to look on. But the empathy we feel with the creature I think we extend to ourselves and others. (The viewer is aware that the creature need not, strictly, be read as female, though this would be the most usual interpretation: the issue might extend to males as well, or, in continuity with her CrowEST’s earlier work, read as treating different racial or cultural norms of beauty and acceptability.)
The use of the ‘alien’ mannequin in all this gets us past the shock that seeing these themes treated more literally or naturalistically would produce. Real people enacting this cosmetic anxiety tend to look too pitiful, too desperate or hysterical, for us to identify—or they are too close to us and we shut down self-protectively, placing a distance between us and them, or rejecting the art as ‘seventies’ in its preoccupations and its aesthetic. CrowEST here uses a glamour that ‘stands for’ human beauty or normalcy (without resembling it). Were she to use a real person their ‘look’ would be their own, effectively: particular, not so generalizable to the simply human, or to the class of all women. The undecidability of exact reference is a strength of the work rather than a weakness.
The range of small sculptural figures relates to the earlier works described above. The objects are made intuitively and directly, the artist says, avoiding second thoughts: the intention is to deal in the (irrationally) emotional and sensual aspects of the materials and of ‘appearance’, the artist’s positive and negative reactions to these resulting figures’ presence. The objects are intended to look as though they are making self-presentations, are consciously ‘on display’, attempting to put their best aspects to the fore (and to hide others). They are meant to seem self-conscious, therefore—and not simply guileless and straightforward. Of course this is not a position of strength—passivity before the anticipated or invited gaze. One is to be judged, after all, and is vulnerable. The spectator will see this and likely feel unwilling to be the judge. The power is incriminating, makes us uneasy.
Have all of these equally got their appearance under control? Are there hints of eruptive elements that might marr the projected appearance, which must be overlooked? As we inspect this side-show taxonomy it would seem so.
In the center of the space sits a slightly abject mirror-ball. It is an amusing reminder of the themes of public display, the arena in which one is judged, found presentable or unacceptable, and in which the fiction is that we are (all) calm, equal and un-judging. Oh anxiety!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unrealised Project by Sarah crowEST 2005
I propose to surreptitiously construct a number of amorphous, concrete blobs in discrete locations around an Australian city. Selected positions will include obscure, neglected corners or spaces where these forms might be allowed the time to set, settle and continue to exist. I anticipate that initially these constructions will evade the attentions of graffiti removal zealots due to their subtle colouring blending into the cityscape. As some of these forms become integrated into the fabric of the city I will proceed to add enamel eyes, paint and shiny foil to their surfaces in the manner of Indian wayside icons. These blobs will be formless and abstract enough to allow the potential imaginative morphing into whatever the viewer might want them to be or to mean. Indeed they may merely serve to arouse curiosity and to mystify.
I am currently an artist in residence in India where I find the religious beliefs, popular cults, mythology, magic and superstition seem to flow, merge and part and sometimes clash not unlike the traffic around Delhi. The Spirituality in the air is palpable. To me it is confusing and complex but I am strongly aware that there always seems to be space for it to exist within everyday life.
My attentions here in India have been directed towards the investigation and construction of pathway icons and wayside deities. I am intrigued by the idea that any individual can create an icon or deity for the fulfillment of personal or communal needs. 'An individual who feels the need of supplication to impart a wish, whether profound and impersonal or simple and personal, makes an image using local materials such as straw or clay, bamboo or stone, or sometimes even cloth'.
I have never considered myself a religious nor even a particularly spiritual person despite my childhood immersion in a Church of England school system. Somehow the brain washing instilled an intermittent need to pray in times of trouble or need despite my rejection of that particular kind of male, all knowing, all seeing god. I’ve developed my own idiosyncratic methods of sending auspicious vibes towards objects or people on which I desire some particular good fortune to descend or transpire. I stretch my very long fingers taught and point them to zap some magic with a zizzzzzzing noise and some imagined sparks (the comic strip of Wizard Weazle was a big childhood influence). I give myself the powers of a goddess and sometimes it works! Here in India I am enchanted to find a confusing plethora of gods and goddesses which appear to allow a great freedom of worship allowing each person to be guided by their own individual spiritual experience, capacities and needs. Here I can imagine that the blobs which I discover and those which I have made myself are quite provisional, subtly abstract, channels of communication with the divine.
from: www.unrealisedprojects.org/pro_sc_03.htm
g&a studios, Surry Hills, Sydney
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Catalogue Essay for Sarah CrowEST's exhibition LOVE and DISSIMULATION
at Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 2003
by KATRINA SIMMONS
A few things about love and dissimulation
A few things that weren't good for me, the wrong path taken instead of the right one, the rubbing up against it, the wearing into of it, of myself, the one that I try to make perfect.
The fearless, cool and successful me, slippery with it. Sticky with guilt and tender spots. A tangled line, one with hooks attached that trails and snags and drags the things I tried to jettison, secret compulsions fed and consequences meted out and the stumbling along from that to the very next thing.
Fragile, violent. Complicated things that I kind of fell into and did to others and had done to me. And it felt so good. And maybe it was wrong and sad and fucked up and no way to live but it was good it was very, very good.
lead heavy
emotion instead of blood
veins cradle
tenuous stones, the trouble
into the heart ks
stay in bed stained sheets
my head hurts and I repeat
maybe you, maybe you, maybe even you
and I’d sell my soul for
total control
yeah I’d sell my soul for
total control
over you
Martha Davis (Motels)
A backward glance, a referential check, to see how that filmy appraisal of life so far, is holding out.
Some people have proof of their reality, photographic stills that captured the necessary information.
Some people go through life with the same haircut. It’s all about the haircut.
I can look at a photograph of an almost naked black man that I have never met and that I never will and it makes me think God that is one fucking beautiful man and it is all about sex and desire and lust and I don’t know him but I know that he is sexy and when I look at that photograph that is all I can think about.
Trapped in the supernatural of a rear vision mirror’s picture postcard glare, memory is selective.
liquid
sun
evaporates some spine
slow
on dandelion incense
watching
plenty
bees kissing
torrid air ks
Some mothers whitewash the past letting out the good bits only for the telling and the showing: no drugs, no smoking, no lovers, no sex, no beatings, no betrayals, no abortions, no lovers, no gambling, no pain, no lovers, no running away, no hating,
(for a review of this exhibition by Jim Strickland see www.dbmagazine.com.au/315/va-SarahCrowest.html - 6k - Supplemental Result - )
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catalogue essay for Sarah CrowEST's exhibition END OF ROLL APPROACHING with Akira Akira at Downtown Artspace 2003
by BRIDGET CURRIE
BAD THINGS
before and after
A slow underground stream. Cold water rock caverns. Hollow reverberation, cocoon highways. Honeycomb ground.
Points of light in a glowing map. A secret, ever expanding grid. Cells in smooth proximity. Warmly lit, crying at night.
A slow heart beating.
In parts, the delicate hairiness of spores, mould mounds, fungal bloom. Sifting the air, a thickness. Particles like smoke, inhaled. Compressed by millennia, an oily bed of coal. Loose with petroleum. She scratched the surface leaking precious products. Paint.
Coalescent dreaming, creaming together the bitter and the sweet. A house to come home to for you outside. A bat of strange crawling habit. A habitat of strange.
Perfect circles
Eggwhite coated
Deep dipped
Smooth slicked
Warm wick’d
Moist sludgy love.
All around things filled, deep dish flesh pizza charm. A thousand eyes, white bellies, tongues licking. Generously fat, burping honey water. Little love chunks from the land of milk and honey.
EST EST EST
Is not.
(for a review of this exhibition by Jim Strickland see www.dbmagazine.com.au/308/iv-EndOfRoll.html )