Sunday, July 19, 2009

Onion Love



It is not often that you are greeted with such pungency as Patty Chang's In Love. A double video installation showing the artist sumptuously devouring a raw onion while her mother and father return the favour. Tears stream down her face and you wonder of the origin: Onion? Disgust? Love?

Pungent. Strangely, the next work at PICA's Intimate Acts is her mirrored reflection in water locking lips with herself. Maybe to wash out the onion breath?

On the adjacent wall are selected prints from Kelli Connell's Double Life series. Onion love, now replaced with its human counterpart, is shown between two versions of the same person. The use of a remarkably androgynous girl is a significant move by Connell. One print, Brickhaus Cafe, best embodies the intimacy theme with it's close depiction of two people in a cafe, eyes locked, smoke swirling amongst human warmth. It is a powerful image, framed to sweep the viewer into the world and deeply impart it's feeling of initimacy.

This theme continues up the staircase to Adam Geczy's Concerts. We get a unique birds eye view of contemporary composer Peter Sculthorpe teaching a sonata to Geczy using only his left hand. It is painful, tedious, and demanding - anyone who has had a piano lesson would understand. This is reality television of a different kind, a voyeuristic look at the patience and persistence required to master a contemporary work.

It offers a level of insight into one's personal space rarely afforded in mainstream media.

Intimate Acts runs until 2 August.

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