A
Bunch of Flowers
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A Bunch of Flowers
A Bunch of Flowers showcased
three distinct groups of works: the first of many plastic assemblage Jam
Session sculptures; three large bill-board scale Classic Shazzy car/girl
collages and several large abstract collage works.
Catalogue text by Chris McAuliffe:
Sculpture used to be about removing the bits that weren’t sculpture.
The everyday plastic items that Paramor gathers from Op shops and dumpsters
don’t have sculptures hidden within them. They become sculptures when
colours jar or harmonise, when internal volume and external projection
are mated effectively, when humble utility gives way to structure and
monument.
Louise Paramor shows that you can put a square peg into a round
hole. But it’s not simply a matter of brute force. Mashing found objects
together at random doesn’t make for sculpture. It’s more a case of
finding objects that don’t know that they’re sculptures and convincing
them to be more ambitious.
Only then do the subtle echoes of earlier aesthetic debates become
audible. Are these assemblages art because they render the functional
non-functional? As Malevich suggested, a vase becomes art when you
stop putting flowers in it. Or are they art because they so cleverly
sidestep the scholastic debates about colour and sculpture? Minimalists
and formalists alike fretted on the problem of colour applied to sculpture.
Paramor simply uses plastics whose colour is embedded within the very
material during the manufacturing process.
Intriguing reflections for an art historian, should he find a quiet
moment. But in the studio, it’s clear that what makes these assemblages
art is the element of improvisation and play that propels them. Making
involves matching disparate items through a process of trial and error,
of playing with the pieces until they speak effectively with each other.
Then they achieve a kind of classical disinterestedness; they are purposefully
without purpose.
Paramor’s large painted paper collages, which enlarge images from
calendars, show a different kind of play. The process of translating
an image into blocks of colour, then pasting together a simplified,
paint-by-numbers version of it, reminds me of school craft projects
and TV art programs for kids. The collages aren’t exercises in nostalgia,
however. While the psychedelic Photoshop flourishes of the originals
show how infinitely manipulable an image is, Paramor’s hand-made reiterations
insist on the fundamental formal structure of the image. Like her three-dimensional
constructions, these paper assemblages are a plea for architecture
as a primary characteristic of the art work.
A Bunch of Flowers was also shown at
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Western Australia in 2006.
The Classic Shazzy collages were created in Rotterdam, The Netherlands
in 2005, during a 3-month residency at Stichting Duende Aktiviteiten.
The solo exhibition entitled Classic Shazzy also took place
at Duende in 2005.
Classic Shazzy 2, was included in the group show Made in
Rotterdam,
Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam in 2005. Classic Shazzy 1, was the
feature work for Cokkie Snoei Gallery at the 2005 Amsterdam Art Fair.
The three Classic Shazzy works were included in the group exhibition, Oomph,
Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 2007.
Jam Session #17, is owned by the National Gallery of Victoria.
A Bunch of Flowers was reviewed in The Age newspaper, The West
Australian newspaper and Art Collector Magazine.
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