James and Eleanor Avery: Supernova

Imagine you’re sitting in a quiet park in small-town America, when suddenly a mysterious craft bears down from above and lands on your head. That craft could easily be Supernova, Brisbane duo James and Eleanor Avery’s installation at GRANTPIRRIE. Supernova – a stand-out follow-up to the glittering idiosyncrasy of the Averys’ 2007 Artspace project Our Day Out, isn’t a reconstruction of a meteorite or UFO as such. But its invocation of uncanny spectacle’s penetration into everyday life is a scenario very familiar from the cinematic genre of cheap science fiction.

The artists intelligently contrast the contextual associations of crystal, pine, Perspex, gold vinyl and macramé to acknowledge the connotative power of particular materials. Within GRANTPIRRIE’s white, clean walls are a pair of unidentifi - able objects; part science fair project, part Close Encounter. The dominant construction is a large-scale, spiky, gold polygonal form held up by scaffolding and decorated about its extremities with cut crystal bowls hung from distinctly earthly macramé plant-hangers. The intervention of craft proper undercuts the fauxseriousness of the structure with a pleasantly prosaic absurdity. Any metaphor of weightlessness is shattered by the visible internal structure supporting the object’s seductive surface, and the pragmatism of the metal scaffolding on which it rests.

The second, smaller structure is a five-sided pine bench, topped with a multi-coloured pentagonal Perspex pyramid, suggesting mystical practices in banal environments. Golden light refracts around the gallery space through the crystal bowls and coloured obelisk, and the interaction between geometries and light creates a warm and engaging illusion of spatial play within the gallery.

Supernova is a fabrication concocted by the connotative suggestion of its constituent materials, simultaneously referencing a self-aware retrofuturism and unreconstructed kitsch. The Averys use their self-devised language of “stuff” to very fl uently create a spatial experience, fi lled with visual and narrative pleasure.

 Supernova shows until 8 Mar. 

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