Mikala Dwyer at Sarah Cottier - Sydney

A midcareer Sydney artist, Mikala Dwyer uses plastic, Styrofoam, fabric and modeling clay to challenge conventional notions of materiality and interior space. Although largely unknown outside Australia, her works are comic, loosely constructed offshoots of the sculptural ideas of Eva Hesse--in the vein of U.S. contemporaries Jessica Stockholder, Sarah Sze and Terri Friedman. Dwyer has developed a playful signature style with funky installations and sculptures. In this exhibition of new work, she riffs on the shapes of common objects such as trees, houses and jewelry.

For Dwyer, form is a kind of collapsible shell for a reality neither constrained nor defined by hard edges and solid surfaces. She evokes the nature of things in Ghost Sculpture (all works 2002), a cluster of four plaster lumps on wooden dowels, each loosely draped with a colored piece of fabric, Halloween-style. Grouped on a triangular pedestal sliced from a slab of Styrofoam, the "figures" seem like spooky, chador-wearing refugees on a floating iceberg. Continuing the otherworldly theme, the quirky video installation We Are Here (a collaboration with David Corben) features a blithe ghost puppet in a violet haze who warbles "Singin' in the Rain."

Other works seem to be elliptical social allegories. Modern Lovers--a kind of abstract sculptural diorama featuring two malleable foam blobs draped over a small wooden model of a house--may represent a troubled domestic partnership. One of the shapes is attached to the house with a clay chain; the other hovers over the structure protectively. Earring for Ceiling is an 8-foot-long clear plastic and resin concoction of loops that dangles from the gallery rafters. Ornamenting the space, the work suggests that what's above may be listening in--thus giving the term "eavesdropping" a new twist.

Color, too, assumes new form. Like a sprouting color chart, the floor piece Up Painting consists of 31 clay stalagmites, each painted a pastel hue. Reversed drips, the wobbly towers assert themselves as bright, antigravitational rebels. A group of "Nail Polish Paintings" leaning against the gallery wall seemed to be casually fashionable accoutrements for the well-dressed home. The witty, evanescent presence of Dwyer's work belies its conceptual rigor and sly brilliance.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group