Was in Perth for the past week, fulfilling my role as a dutiful brother by seeing my sister dress up in robes and a goofy hat (her PhD thesis is 252 pages-long). Didn’t get up to much, otherwise: I missed most of the Perth International Arts Festival 2008 — though this was personal ennui more than anything. It looked very respectable, with stuff by Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen, Brit collective dreamthinkspeak’s Don’t Look Back (which, incidentally, was at the Majestic Hotel in early 2007 and perhaps was the most haunting performance Kuala Lumpur saw, that year), and musicians like Sonic Youth and Feist.

Spending time near the John Curtin Gallery meant I did get to see Singapore-born, Perth-resident Matthew Ngui’s Points of View, an anthological overview of the artist’s work over the last 20 years. His obsession seems to be anamorphosis, the distortion-reconstitution play frequently seen in the output of people like Patrick Hughes, Kelly M Houle, or Shigeo Fukuda — but unlike these others the distortion in Matthew’s work occurs not only as a warping of a single image, but the fracturing of that image across space. The first piece of Points of View is “Untitled / Seeing may be believing but no always understanding”, which has that sentence rendered in shadowed cursive and spread over the walls of the gallery’s entrance into its space.

Matthew Ngui’s “Swimming; at least 8 points of view”, which presents an apparently whole image that is several video clips handsomely edited together; effectively a work of  anti-anamorphosis

That sentiment is repeated audio-visually through a video cobble-together of network news soundbites — the television on which this is displayed sits in the middle of “Untitled / Standing on high ground, one looks down, forgetting the universe above”, the most impressive piece of the exhibition; that cautionary proverb of accruing material wealth is seen by searching for the right spot to look into a forest of PVC pipes — the right two spots, actually, since the text in split in two, seen from opposite ends. (Lazy viewers cheated by deciphering it in a separate room that had a spliced projection of the words.)

Themes: deciphering reality, comprehension of facts, further obfuscation and the fluidity of meaning (by the suspicion that, even if you see the image Matthew wants you to see, you may not grasp at his intended connotations). Most of all, though, I liked the artist’s work because of its sense of precise playfulness (I’m easily seduced by geekery). Matthew seems to be quite ambitious in riffing on his effect of choice: his anamorphic images already occupy the Potong Pasir MRT station in Singapore; he plans to execute an overblown version of “HOME” across the island state’s cityscape.

In fact, much of my mental experience of Perth was annexed by the idea of space — no surprises there, since both my sister and her husband are architects. Picking through the shelves of my brother-in-law’s office at Curtin University I found Steward Brand’s How Building Learn, a superlatively fascinating read (with pictures!) about how structures have always evolved over time — frequently in rebellion to old-school architecture’s aspirations of perpetuity. Highlights: a description of Hugh Hardy’s swiveled redesign of a New York 1840s row house, which simultaneously blends in with its existing street and acknowledges the Weathermen’s accidental self-bombing that demolished its predecessor; a citation of Pamela Cunnington’s conservation principle, in Care for Old Houses, that additions should never exceed half the size of the original building, an examples of how cottages that do not adhere to this principle turn into something else entirely; and an examination of the Malay kampung house, “a wonder of incremental architecture.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Reads, Visual Art, Writing, Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.