As a recent break-up-er, the task to review the Sydney College of the Arts Student Society’s (SCASS) show, “love Deluxe”, filled me with a certain trepidation. I imagined the exhibition teeming with my peers and their uncomplicated and unconditional embrace of love. The daydream broadened to a room full of couples, connecting the intimacy of the works to their own partnerships. In my mind, the exhibition had become a potion of sorts:a pink hellscape of mutuals devoting their love and then me, the notes app, and my editor Vic.
The exhibition featured current Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) students and “an extended universe of scassophillics” displaying their representations of love. In this “sappy group-sop”, love is explored in all its genres and intricacies, adorning all that enter the exhibition. Works were clustered on the floor, ceiling, and walls. They intercepted conversations and interrupted movement around the space.
Lara-Marie Wilkinson’s ‘like trees’ was nervously stepped around, with hair and shell-like paraphernalia enmeshed in a single bicycle wheel in the centre of the space. It was a delicately-organised cacophony of found items; a demanded invitation to look closer and sit with the tangles and the muck. Jennifer Lara White’s ‘all my words, forgotten in a kiss; venustraphobia,’ whilst hidden behind the main exhibition space, became a central point of connection between artwork and audience. A ghostly slice of fabric hung in front of a projection coloured by ever-changing visuals casting a shadow on the wall behind and obscuring an easy-viewing of the transcendent sequences. With seats on either side of the projection, love-viewers are forced to walk behind the fabric and throw an even greater shadow to take up the offer of a welcome rest. In white thread stitched on white fabric, Jennifer Lara White writes “do you want to talk about it?”. There was no avoiding it, this love was not to be ignored.
Each artwork was accompanied only by a silver heart container. We wondered if the artist information could be found inside, but we instead found little rolled-up love letters from audience to artist. Whilst the sharing of these divulgences extended the intimacy of the exhibition, I wish I had been able to trace their declarations of love to the artists themselves. Whilst I am a shameless sucker for an artist statement, even a numbered room brochure would’ve assisted to ensure audiences could recognise the artists for the works in front of them. Visibility is certainly integral for emerging creatives and it feels like a loss that artists cannot be immediately recognised for their works.
Along the walls of the central space, love sat side by side. Maeve Jefferies’ hardened silver enmeshment ‘Love me Knot’ next to the alluringly soft (yet undoubtedly unnerving) snuggling rabbits in abstract (‘psychopomp’) — by Lily Tsuruko Tucker — reiterated the reflexivity of our love — it appears as ours and ours alone — inevitably different and inevitably the same. Bonnie Huang’s bar of soap was suspended in a plastic bag fusing with another loverSoap and becoming one — their newly communal form embellished with a red rose. Juliette Burgess creates a pink calamity of pearl-studded worship — we are called to the altar for submission to this higher (unicorn) spirit.
Old flames and new flirts — the attendees spoke to the love exhibited, and the exhibited preached to the lovers. Beyond the romantic tinge of the space, warmth seemed to flow from the pride that each person had for another. In hugs and in kisses. In touches and in smiles. In secrets and in congratulations. We love our flings/flirts/forevers, but we return to our friends. The art scene in Sydney is (terrifyingly) small. Yet, for what it lacks in breadth, it compensates in the respect of displaying your heart on your sleeve to everyone you have ever met.
Artist Lauren Maccoll explains her textile work to be a “nod to the often unseen labour that has shaped my understanding of love.” The people in this room, both exhibitors and visitors, turn up, and show up, to see each other over and over again. A labour of love. Maccoll’s work hangs off padded coathangers, adorned with the lyrics of Courtney Barnett’s ‘Sunday Roast’, Some kind of Sweet relief’, which she also has titled the work. I love this exhibition (and I love Courtney Barnett) but mostly I love the adoration those in Backspace held for one another on opening night. To take a page out of Lauren’s book, or perhaps rip her off, I too find myself stuck in the lyrics of ‘Sunday Roast’: “And I know all your stories, but I’ll listen to them again.”
May we continue to turn up, continue to look, continue to listen and continue to love.
love Deluxe: 4.5/5
love Deluxe is on at Backspace Gallery, Level 3, Wentworth Building, University of Sydney. For more information, look to @sca.studentsoc.
