RGB & UNKEMPT COGNITION

Exhibition Review: Visual Art | Brian Rope

RGB | Nicci Haynes

UNKEMPT COGNITION | Ella Barclay

Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) Lakeside Canberra | 13 July – 14 September 2024

These two exhibitions are both exciting, visual treats to enjoy. The colours are mostly vivid, powerful, almost mesmerising.

Nicci Haynes is an artist based in Kamberri/Canberra. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, performance, print, film, and installation. Her experimental practice is process driven. She is creative in her use of a variety of materials and spontaneous in her approach, frequently recycling technology and odd objects. In RGB this artist expands her investigation of how language and communication intersect and interact across various media.

Haynes is showing just three artworks, but each of them is excellent and, as previously noted, richly colourful. RG-Being is a 1-minute-long digital video which flicks very quickly through a series of photographs by Andrew Sikorski. Each image is full of colour. Each is, I presume, of the same person in a variety of poses wearing, displaying, putting on or taking off brightly coloured but otherwise plain items of clothing, all absolutely in the RGB spectrum.

NICCI HAYNES 'RG-Being' (still 3), 2024, Digital video (photos by Andrew Sikorski), 1’00” duration

Then there is an installation utilising digital videos, TVs, projectors and electronics. A wonderful tower of more colour on numerous monitors (once discarded but now re-used). A constantly changing mosaic – pinks, yellows, blues, oranges, all vying for attention. And the third piece is another installation – a multi-projector projection of more colours - less vibrant, more pastel. Three great artworks.

NICCI HAYNES '255, 255, 255' 2024, Installation (digital videos, TVs, projectors, electronics), dimensions variable, photo by Brenton McGeachie

NICCI HAYNES 'Being Colour' 2024, Installation (multi-projector projection), dimensions variable, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

The room sheet essay by Dr Denise Thwaites is titled Harmless Fun. It makes an interesting suggestion - that the artworks are monumental, but worn, reminding her of a place in Budapest where old Soviet monuments have been torn down and reconfigured. Haynes artworks here ask what we can see in piles of junk. This essay is a fine accompaniment to the exhibition.

Ella Barclay's first institutional Kamberri/Canberra solo exhibition, Unkempt Cognition, features brand-new work created during a residency at ZK/U The Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, in 2024. The exhibition combines photographs and a series of humorous light installations to investigate basic human experiences inside our networked everyday lives. A world of growing disasters and clumsy automation awaits us in the doom-scroll bed-rotting experience.

Again there is a great deal of vivid colour. Three large inkjets on archival cotton rag from her Enhanced Entanglements series are vibrant, multi-coloured Contemporary abstract creations shouting look at us.

ELLA BARCLAY 'Enhanced Entanglements 1 (Deployments and Abstentions)' 2023, Inkjet on archival cotton rag, 84 x 61.4cm, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

As much as I enjoyed the three prints hanging on a wall, they have to compete for attention with nine installation pieces which are quite fascinating. 

Three large, molded blankets of black acrylic adorn parts of the floorspace. At one end of each piece we see colourful footwear peeking out; the other end reveals parts of blond wigs. Are there bodies hidden under there?

ELLA BARCLAY 'Quiet Serfing 2' 2024, Acrylic, Crocs, blonde wig, beach volleyball, 230 x 120 x 40cm, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Accompanying the three-dimensional blankets in the space are various assemblages utilising more of the black acrylic, plus LED lights, electronics, aluminium, silicon, hand blown glass and other materials. Some of these pieces are also on the floor, others suspended from the ceiling. Above them all a wonderful and lengthy tangle of LED silicon lights delivers multiple colours that reflect delicious patterns on the shiny surfaces of the black acrylic artworks. Once again, rich colours in abstract patterns.

ELLA BARCLAY 'Unkempt Cognition' (Canberra Contemporary Art Space exhibition installation), 2024, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Another fine room sheet essay, by William Kherbek, discusses the distinction between information and knowledge. It tells us that “Barclay’s works regularly explore the edge cases of presence, the body is present, or has been present, its traces are visible, the edges of its intentions are visible if not entirely intelligible”. I encourage all to visit the two exhibitions and to read both the essays, both before and after seeing the artworks. They are also available on the CCA website.

All contributors to the two exhibitions have delivered a great show.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.