You may remember Tanya Poole as being the joint winner of the Brett Kebble award in 2004 with her work Missing You, which was an accomplished piece featuring a nice pseudo-video art approach applying a degree of random narrative to two portrait paintings. That approach is repeated here with the work Drift Installation albeit sans the sound aspect. This effectively removes the randomness that made Missing You so good (the paintings “spoke” out of synch and thus the potential for them to speak at the same time emerged) and makes the work quite bland. Fair enough, I’m not sure how you incorporate sound into a work wherein one of the two figures is sleeping (snoring?) but without sound the work just doesn’t pique one’s curiosity. It’s well executed but lacks anything really interesting. Which is pretty much true of the entire exhibition. It’s also lacking somewhat in cohesion, it feels as though the works sit independently of each other rather than flowing as a nice, larger, dialoguing enitity. Perhaps my definition of exhibition constituents is too Marxist. Oddly enough it is a series of painted doors that seem the most fascinating. They are very well painted and, in move of effective curatorship, placed next to the actual “Private” door of the gallery; bringing into the exhibition the whole reality vs illusion idea.

Labels: review