Monochrome/Piano 1992 & Articles of Blue, Black and White

• Camille Orel

In the notes published for his 1994 ACCA exhibition, Thesis, John Nixon writes the following:

The “Exhibition” is provisional by nature…The art of exhibition is a dialectical relationship between painting/object and the room (gallery, warehouse, museum, etc.) which the given orthodoxies about hanging and placement are questioned…The exhibition here is not merely “the frame” for the works but an active/ (provisional) arrangement of its parts, integral to the art.

This thesis gives atmosphere to Conners Conners current side-by-side exhibition, a double-chambered display featuring Isabella Darcy’s Articles of Blue, Black and White and the late John Nixon’s Monochrome/Piano 1992.

For the last three years, Conners has occupied two rooms of the Fitzroy Town Hall situated in the middle of Napier Street. Built in 1873, its Victorian-era grandeur has been re-fitted by artists and co-curators Ry Haskings, Vince Alessi and Narelle Desmond to house an intimate, white-cube, artist run gallery. Indeed, as a dual functioning site, caught between civic duty and aesthetic commitment, Conners embodies the dialectical entwinements Nixon noticed in the “provisional exhibition” nearly three decades ago.