“Adventures with Form in Space”is the theme of this year’s Balnaves Sculpture Project at the AGNSW. And it is a particularly good year.
Hot on the heels of NASA’s announcement that Dark Matter exists, comes Nike Savvas’s accurately title installation “Atomic: full of love, full of wonder”. It is an amazing room of freeze framed atoms that apart from some maverick dad letting his daughter play and tug at the sculpture, leaves the assembled viewers quietly agog. Suspended polystyrene balls held in place on nylon wire fill the room in a rough grid, running though the spectrum from reds to blues up the room with a few rogue orange balls escaping their hue, bubbling up into the cooler tones.
Occasionally a set of industrial fans blow the whole thing into a jittery field of wobbling uncertainty. Like most things the balls soon reach thier natural frequency and begin bobbing in time, like a matrix of nervous junkies. Left going, one wonders if the combined power of each row’s low harmonic resonance would be enough to unsettle the stability of the gallery walls bringing down the building in a vision of an apocalyptic Ikea ballroom.
Also of interest is “Continuous Moment” by Daminao Bertoli which recalls the “Sea of Ice“, Capser David Friedrich’s masterpiece of the monumental rupturing of geological forces. Here, Friedrich’s painting is reimagined as a pile of building site detritus; plasterboard, mdf, and painted timber. Gone are the earth shattering forces that can destroy a boat without batting an eyelid and in their place a nicely arranged pile of debris.
More photos of the exhibition here.
And a rundown on the other artworks at the exhibition here.
