Gallery Crawl | Sydney

​We were in Sydney this past week and decided to go on a culture / gallery crawl. Our first stop - and recommended space - was White Rabbit Gallery. A gallery that specializes in contemporary Chinese art. Unfortunately they were closed and currently installing the next show, “Paradi$e Bitch” to open on September 10. The next stop was Gallerie Pompom - literally around the corner. The front room of the gallerie (MOP Projects) was a group exhibition, “Against A Degree Of Blindness” by artists Anna John, Del Lumantam Justine Varga and curated by Isobel Parker Phillip It was an academically heavy exhibition which prompted the viewer to buy the texts for $10 (I assume to understand the works) as there was limited entry points into this show. The (free) description of the show told me that the exhibition “is an open question (a provocation disguised as an exhibition.) Can you articulate an impulse? Can you condense and capture the process of actualisation? How does an image or an object accommodate and account for its own genesis? Its own ‘coming into being’? Attempting to answer these questions, Against a degree of blindness adopts a conceptual framework borrowed from literary theory. From writing about writing. Texts whose authors strive to account for the ungovernable and indefinable force that propels their writing serve as the exhibition’s preface. How does a sentence find itself? At what point does the mute and the formless tip into legibility?” These works were very difficult to enter and I didn’t particularly enjoy them. I’m finding more and more that this faux-academia polluting art is making for exclusionary works and whatever it is that the artist is trying to do can get lost within this extreme formal minimalism and buzzwords and terms that make almost no sense. It is intangible. There is nowhere for me to go with this. It was a disappointing start. In the back room Leo Coyte’s “Mystic Misfits” was being installed. A selection of fun paintings - beautifully framed - and with a fun hang. From Pompom we walked down the road to The Contemporary where the space was currently being painted and re-patched mid show. The works were small underwhelming paintings. We wandered around Redfern and saw some interesting street works. From here we caught the train into the city and visited Art Equity. We were greeted warmly and welcomed into the space. The current show was an already sold-out “Savage River” painting exhibition by Nicholas Blowers. It was beautiful and militantly uniform. We had a lovely chat with the staff there and then headed off for champagne on the roof of the MCA. At the MCA a large show, “Energies: Haines & Hinterding” was currently showing. This enormous exhibition was by Blue Mountains-based Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. It was an exploration into their fascination with energetic forces; electricity, cosmic, psychic etc. Utilizing a variety of media the works filled the MCA with interactive, pseudo-scientific installations. I found this all to feel very kitsch and felt like a family science learning center. I wasn’t particularly engaged with the faux-science of the work or the hyper-interactivity of some of the displays. Fingerprints of children’s grubby little hands smeared over “TOUCH ME” perspex cases of electrical circuit drawings became distracting and repulsive. The room with the TV antennae constantly vibrating made me regret my rooftop champagne. I wasn’t about it. It was too -carnival-ey without any point. I did however fall completely in love with Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s “To Be Carried Away By The Current, To Be Dissolved In The Other” sculpture on the Loti Smorgon Sculpture Terrace. Spiritual, haunting and gorgeous - larger than life and alien - it is a humbling, silent sight to make you stop and feel the entire Circular Quay area around you below. Finished in a mother-of-pearl luminescence, the work is god-like. “Melbourne-based artist Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s larger-than-life, fibreglass sculpture faces out over the harbour to the ocean beyond. It is a mer-child, combining the body of a child with the head of an ancient fish, and created in response to our changing relationship to the sea.” We walked through the beautiful botanical gardens to the Art Gallery of NSW where the Archibald is currently showing. From there we walked down to Wooloomooloo to see Alaska Projects. I have heard polarizing things about this space and wanted to see it for myself. But alas it was closed. I then enjoyed a few more champagne’s at a local pub before heading off to the four openings down the road at Firstdraft...