Art exists as a façade; it shrouds the real. Hannah Bertram, Juan Ford and Siri Hayes use a range of techniques and approaches to explore the relationship between reality and illusion. In their chosen media – installation, painting, and photography, respectively, their unique visions converge, forming a patina over the surface of the real and altering the way we experience the world.

Hannah Bertram is drawn to the temporal and the decorative. She renders ephemera with a masterly approach; her inspiration is the ornamental design of ancient tapestries. Using a combination of dust and powder derived from marble, she recreates the intricate patterning of exotic woven carpets with exceptional precision. Yet Bertram’s rug is not one for walking on. There is no cushioned surface protecting us from the hard floor beneath. It is an illusion of a rug. With its connotations of domesticity and containment, Bertram’s ephemeral rug, like its permanent counterpart, is readily transportable.¹ Her discipline in executing this work is not dissimilar to that of a Tibetan Monk’s when creating a mandala sand–drawing. There is a certain tension underpinning Bertram’s works – the viewer is invited to ponder the role of functionality and the value of time and labour against a backdrop of impermanence, the decorative, and the nature of illusion.

Symbolically, a rug may represent status or high aesthetic ideals: it is a statement of one’s place in the world. It may be worn our and homely or untouched and made only with the finest hand-crafted fibre. Rather than representing economic status however, Bertram’s rug floats in a psychological space informed by memory, time and place. Indeed the stature of Bertram’s rug is threatened by its own ephemerality. Created with a knowledge of its ontological misgivings, we experience the work not only physically and visually but also viscerally – breathe too heavily and it might just blow away.

Juan Ford’s paintings are suffused with an unearthly and magnetic power; they evince hyperrealism. His object – based paintings authorize the viewer, making us cognizant of the role of perception and the act of seeing. In Ignorance, 2006, Ford melds the slick surface of a stainless steel cylinder with the medium of painting. The painted canvas is presented horizontally yet we come to view it vertically as in the cylinder’s mirrored surface we see, with clarity, the vision of the peculiar painting it is placed on. This is the product of a process known as cylindrical anamorphosis by which we become active players in the activation of space and time. This optical illusion heightens our awareness of the act of seeing. The object yields an illusory space vis a vis the viewer’s gaze; the distorted painting of the artist wearing the façade of a pig’s head becomes a recognizable vision, somewhat strange yet easily discernible.

Space and time are also addressed in the vestigial paintings by Ford including Husk #6, oil on linen, 2006, where the past is revisited through a contemporary lens. This work honours ancient Roman sculpture, and the Classicists such as Caravaggio.²  The weight of marble is articulated through Ford’s refined tonal rendering. It conveys a sense of grandeur and yet, the monument is pictured in a state of weathered decay. The head, disembodied and floats in limbo, caught between worlds.

Siri Hayes captures her photographic subjects wearing the painted faces of clowns. The sitters look toward the viewer in bleak and often disillusioned states; they appear awkwardly accepting in their painted guises. In Kristian Rocket I, Type C Print, 2006, there is a performative aspect to the image – the subject wipes away a section of his colourful mask and partially reveals the natural façade of his skin beneath.

Clowns belong on the stage – they are by definition performers whose function is to incite laughter. Yet Hayes’ clowns appear defeated and melancholic. Captured in moments of varying states of disengagement, they don’t harbour the sinister characteristics of The Joker³ or of Stephen King’s infamous clown Pennywise⁴, but through their impermanent guises, appear to be reconciling the existentialist stressors and complexities of contemporary life with the hollow reassurance of a superficial laugh.

The mask and the wearer intercept in a state of delirious coexistence and we are troubled by the potential loss of reality experienced by each subject that is portrayed. Familiar with living a precarious existence is The Joker, who in his most recent reincarnation in the film The Dark Knight, 2008, exudes a wild and unremittent malice, typified by the line: “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you… stranger.” And perhaps more unnervingly: “Y’see, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little…push.”⁵ Hayes nudges us into a strange world where the viewer’s discomfort sits somewhere between psychosis, imagination and the inane.

The representations in A Strange Façade allude to illusory worlds into which we may unknowingly fall. Each artist espouses a state of impermanence, whether it be the temporality of a painted face, the short-lived function of an installation on a gallery floor or the painted mirage manifest fleetingly through an object’s mirrored surface.

Through differing modes of presentation, Bertram, Ford and Hayes present a dual world where disunity between two states is a constant. Their work simultaneously appropriates and dissolves; it defies unification between the polarities of order and disorder, the visible and the invisible, and the real and the unreal.

From this tension, strangeness emerges.

Claire Watson
Curator
September 2008

Published by: Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale