HERE
WE ARE THEN
In cinema, activity contained by
narrative framing can hint at a universe beyond the local narrative as an
ellipse often occurring at The End. In Chekhov (the Russian writer to whom Maeve
tells me she has formed an attachment) characters
inhabit clearly defined places, situated in a kind of pre-cinematic spatial mise en scene, place is key to their
narrative form. There is this same tension in these paintings as their
contained form and arrested energy fixes the temporal activity of painting in
dimensions inside and outside the boxes.
Here we are then, first with 43 small polyglottous paintings.
Small strokes inscribe stories, a number of occasions coexist in one
pictorial space just as a place that can be described or named exists only when
a number of temporalities have occupied it.
In these paintings multiple, sometimes repetitive, actions and movements
describe a spatial index, the body and movement both within and beyond the
frame: activity is occupation within borders colonised by haptic
abstraction.
There are qualities here that I
remember from Maeve’s films in the nineties when we were both active in the
Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. Films like Tawdry Sass (1996),
incised and painted skinny film, in effect not unlike some of these
paintings. A voice on its soundtrack
offers a clue describing “… a symbolic conquest of some kind of room’s regular
boundaries”. Scrammy and the Blowflies (1995), made for the Bush Studies project of super 8 film based on Barbara Baynton’s short stories, is perhaps the closest Maeve comes
to conventional ‘narrative’, expressing claustrophobia born out of containment,
wherein, given a voice, Scrammy plots escape from his
imprisoning hut. Then the film Out of Place (1991) is alive with
non-human subjectivity occupying a carefully defined macro world. At 52 minutes the film is long by most super
8 standards, but doesn’t conform to the familiar avant-garde durational mode of the heroic internalised
temporal subjectivity; rather it presents spatially related subjectivities,
coexisting in some interstitial place ‘out there’.
And now we are here, larger paintings
with cinematic titles like Rear
Window and Andalusian Slit (recalling Hitchcock and
Buñuel, both of course occasional collaborators with Salvador
Dali); feature-length with bold shapes and dissected space, like a floor plan
of wheelchair-imprisoned voyeur James Stewart’s apartment, but the window
here seems less suited to voyeurism, more a sinister opaque dark barrier threatening
to block the view. In Maeve’s ‘Andalusian’ painting
the cinematic icon of the dissected eye has been transformed into something
like a danger sign through an abstraction of composition, or a diagram in
which the razor has become a stake or a rod. I am reminded that surrealism
thrives in that most dangerously mundane zone of the uncanny in the quotidian.
The
relationship between titles with quite specific references and formally quite
abstract paintings, is deliberate and carefully considered, not an after thought but as a way of complementing the works. The
title of Firs on Stage, with Locked
Doors comes from Maeve’s interest in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: the central round ‘stage’ of the painting seems
deserted and deforested, a bleak greyness hemmed
in, taunted perhaps, by the bustling world beyond its boundary. The titles
suggest that abstract painting is not just some kind of ineffable expression,
but part of a complex visual vocabulary, a spatial narrative extending in
many directions.
Steven
Ball, London, 2007