Simryn Gill at Roslyn Oxley9 - Sydney - Brief Article

Simryn Gill is a Sydney-based, Singapore-born artist, raised in Malaysia and educated in India and the U.K. Since the early 1990s she has earned a reputation for quirky, clever installation and photo-based work and has been represented in major exhibitions in the Australasian region. Most recently her work was included in the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, as well as in "Flight Patterns" at L.A. MOCA. Gill's series "A small town at the turn of the century" consists of 39 Cibachrome images, each 3 feet square, depicting the people of Port Dickson, her hometown on the Straits of Malacca. This slice of small-town life reveals her capacity to couch complex political and conceptual concerns in witty visual terms imbued with art-historical reference yet drawn from the everyday contemporary world. She poses her subjects in resolutely ordinary locations that collectively reflect the town's social diversity, from private homes and gardens to restaurant kitchens and parking lots. The most striking feature of each image is that Gill has replaced the townsfolk's heads with exotic fruits. Nevertheless, the individuals seem to confront the viewer's voyeuristic gaze with Olympialike directness. The images somehow combine the wry Surrealism of Magritte's faceless figures with the scrutinizing intensity of Thomas Struth's portraits, probably because all subjects are centered or foregrounded and their body language intently addresses the camera.

These are ordinary characters revealed in their natural settings, surrounded by the daily accoutrements that Gill is careful to retain. Some, like the breadfruit/ banana golfing pair standing in the lush green landscape of their recreational habitat, recall in their display of comfortably wealthy lifestyles Gainsborough's 18th-century portraits of the landed gentry. Others belong to the middle and laboring classes: a child splashing her feet in the club pool; the weathered rubber tapper whose soiled work clothes are offset by her headdress of radiant pink fruit; and the three blue-collar men sharing beers at a grimy laminate table of the type found in cheap cafes around the world.

In the same way that visually impaired people use alternative cues to perceive the world, Gill's audience can gain insight into these small-town characters even without seeing their visages. In post-colonialist terms, her humorously contrived imposition of "faceless" anonymity satirizes the notion of the "invisible other." Though the identities of her protagonists are obscured by the exotic masks they don, each vignette reveals a snippet of life as personal as it is familiar.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group