Contemporary Australia: Women

61 Rebecca Baumann Australia b.1983 Improvised smoke device 2010 Five minute performance, 825m3 coloured smoke, aluminium, foil, wire, black powder, quick match fuse, detonator Photograph: Bewley Shaylor Image courtesy: The artist Rebecca Baumann’s works are often enacted through the very act of looking, yet, despite their apparent simplicity and ephemerality, evoke an array of complex emotional overtones. Informed by research across the fields of psychology, sociology, colour theory and art history, Baumann’s body of work has taken form, and anti-form, in performances, kinetic sculptures and interventions in space. Conjuring the vocabulary of Minimalism and Post-minimalism, while, at the same time, reinvigorating it with open-ended content and tautological materials, Baumann leaves the construction of meaning to the participation of viewers, only subtly hinting at artistic intent. Untitled Cascade 2012, for instance, extends across space as a luminous curtain, shimmering in overlapping tendrils of golden tinsel. The gentle confrontation of this golden screen evokes a sense of the tactile and the sensory, inviting the viewer to observe how its shape is elegantly altered by the slight breeze emanating from a domestic fan swinging slowly back and forth in repetitive, predictable arcs. This collective, public experience of looking, however, never carries over into action. Instead the viewer is transfixed, stuck in an endless loop of anticlimactic celebration. The work exists as a site of conceptual, transitory passage and emotional flux — from the known to the unknown. It’s like a surprise party without guests, and while the combination of materials is a wink and a nod to the hyper, the work slides easily into the realm of the deadpan — a desultory disco. Just as the winking golden light enraptures, it also prompts an acknowledgement of how fleeting moments of happiness truly are. Dislocated from its usual festive context, Baumann’s tinsel curtain alludes to the poignancy that settles over a party at its end — surrounded by the still glittering detritus of excess, temporally transformed from signifier of celebration into garbage, and now destined for the bin. Another work employing materials typically associated with celebratory acts, Smoke Fields 2012 1 consists of a series of small explosions, launching sheets of monochromatic colour into the air. In collaboration with a pyrotechnician, Baumann detonates a series of smoke canisters, delivering blasts of candy-coloured smoke into the sky. Rather than spectacle (though by its very nature it is exactly that), the object of this performance is transformation itself. Her tinted plumes — red, orange, yellow, green and blue — bloom brightly, appearing briefly animated before slowly dissipating into the surrounding atmosphere. Its short duration and ephemeral nature means the work is tinged with nostalgia even as it happens. Both temporary and temporal, smoke’s existence is borne along by non‑existence: it falls and rises, yet retains no tangible outline or surface. This is, of course, part of its appeal for an artist whose refined aesthetic is one of theatrical anti-climacticism. Baumann’s interest in celebration and happiness has little to do with the cloying sentimentality of Hollywood endings but is instead aligned with more complex understandings. Loosely inspired by the Hindu Holi festival and Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which position disorder and destruction alongside joy and exultation, Smoke Fields , too, has a discomforting edge. Smoke is a sign of danger, which, along with the crack and spark of small-scale explosions, gives an alarming tinge to a work that embraces the revelatory potential of colour. Waiting for the moment of detonation, and watching as the smoke is choreographed by the wind, the audience forms a found community drawn together in a collective intake of breath and subject to a tide of emotions — from anticipation and anxiety to delight and exhilaration. Exciting, yet elegant, Smoke Fields lives on only as memory — a moment in time marking something vibrant and vital, with beauty at its heart. Complex affective relationships involving colour and emotion recur in Baumann’s work. With Mixed Feelings 2012, the artist again takes her materials and their cultural functions, resonances and narratives to task. The work consists of a reworked printer suspended from the ceiling, programmed to spit out random pairings of coloured paper, every minute. We watch as the work unfolds: paper whirls and dances, briefly suspended in space, before settling atop a growing multicoloured abstraction on the floor, subject to air currents and passing time. Here, the visibility of colour is in constant Rebecca Baumann Rebecca Baumann Low dimensional chaos