Music as Image is a modest group exhibition with a directly announced curatorial premise, articulated and produced by two practicing artists — Sean Lowry and Kim Donaldson, here operating under the banner Cūrā8. They are also the team responsible for establishing the new gallery for the exhibition: project8, a short ride in a clean lift to the second floor of a 3-storey white-rendered building in the new-swank west end of Collins Street. It’s a few doors down from Celine (the hobo-chic couturier currently known for taking out multiple pages in Artforum and Frieze). If image is everything (and it is), then Music as Image can be viewed as a micro-reflexive demurring of that adage, here explored through how the musicological can be made manifest within ye olde white cube.
The gallery space is sparely though not sparsely occupied by the work of six artists. They range in scale (from Masato Takasaka’s 1:1 scale reproductions of solitary CD case designs to Karina Utomo and Cūrā8’s floor-to-ceiling video projection of a solo, growling vocal performance), spatiality (from Justene Williams’ free-standing, sculptural prop manipulations to Lucreccia Quintanilla’s spread of post-Rave flotsam and printed T-shirts) and ontology (from Lewis Gittus’ small digital video and lathe-cut vinyl discs to Ilmar Taimre’s serial display of postcard reproductions of Classical antiquities depicting Apollo). True to the exhibition’s rhetorical remit, they are all images of music. And interesting connections can be made between them.
Philip Brophy writes on art among other things.
