Childhood mysteries evocatively explored
The Age
Wednesday July 1, 2009
LITTLE COVER-UPS Alison Burton, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art at Chapman & Bailey, 350 Johnston Street, Abbotsford, until Saturday. kallirolfecontemporaryart.com SMALL WORLD Meg Williams, [MARS] Melbourne Art Rooms, 418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, until Sunday marsgallery.com.au TWO muscular girls in a ready-for-anything pose stare at us behind their bug-eyed goggles. Dressed in one-piece swimsuits, these identical twins are submerged in the deep among large spherical bubbles. With all their awesome solidarity beneath the surface, the children are disconcertingly abnormal.In the painting Little Duplicity, by Alison Burton, the underwater athletes have a bizarre feature. The gusset of their swimsuits uncannily sprouts forward in the form of a snorkel, or male appendage. Shoulder by shoulder, the girls present as a masculine machine, with formidable co-ordination and exaggerated anabolic functions.The unwanted appendage proposes freakish physiological loopholes. . It is as if the oesophagus has become redundant, as the image restores the umbilical connection of mother and baby in the amniotic fluid, where oxygen still passes to the infant without lung.This breathtaking, dreamy painting is one of 10 cryptic pictures of children in a solo exhibition called Little Cover-Ups, staged by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art at Chapman and Bailey. Painted in a smooth, graphic style with crisp outlines, the pictures explore some unsettling content.In Little Retribution, a girl grabs a swan and crushes its head beneath a bare foot. Perhaps referring to the famous rape of Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan - the subject of numerous baroque celebrations - the girl is now getting her revenge.Other historical references are suggested, as in Little Punching Bag. A girl in boxing gloves and with a distorted leg recalls with a vengeance Ribera's picture in the Louvre of a dependent beggar-boy with club foot. Still more sinister connotations present in Little Beauty, in which a girl is partially dressed in an adult corset, brandishing a whip-like mirror or hairbrush. She has a beatific expression, and a disconcerting radiance emanates from behind her.The mixture of innocence and inscrutable wickedness is summed up in two circular pictures called Little Secret, each with heavenly lolly background and two chubby hands covering the face, leaving only one eye exposed. A secret is held but simultaneously let out, a leak in the perfect bubble, like the air of the twin mermaids in Little Duplicity that derives from the wrong passage.Things in Little Cover-Ups sit on many levels. Some cues are Freudian and other elements simply belong to the wondrous paradoxes of childhood.Equally spooky evocations of childhood can be seen in the rich paintings of Meg Williams at MARS. Each scene in her Small World has been set up like a diorama. Dolls, toys and food are posed in curious interactions, where romantic themes are subsumed in the quaint but inherently perverse world of the toy box.In Meat Tray, a dancing couple gropes in front of a slab of meat in plastic wrapper, all under the supervision of a giant Cookie Monster sculpture. In Blue Cup a pig receives the attentions of a naked bending doll; and, in The Journey, the same couple is seen upon the high seas, where the naked doll is rowing over a blue cloth and the pig sits behind her as a blindfolded prisoner. All of this is staged inside a cardboard box.Also in a box of sorts - and with the same blue cloth acting as a curtain - a male superhero sits on the floor talking to a giant baby who dwarfs him. Called The Conversation, the discussion on such unequal terms inverts the typical power relations of gender and age.All these scenarios are painted with impeccable tonal sensitivity, capturing the substance of the several trifles and endowing their absurdities with a monumental coherent presence.Williams is such a good painter that she thinks nothing of placing an empty glass in front of a ceramic jug, as in Still Life with Pig, where both vessels share the clout of the toy pig, the baroque curtain and cardboard box. As with Burton, Williams shows that the more you look into a child's imagination, the more mystery there is to see.
© 2009 The Age
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