Beyond the Thunderdome | No More Heroes Anymore

Sharne Wolff

Joel Crosswell might seem like just another young artist playing with ideas about life and death until you learn that this obsession originates from a true-life incident when his father was badly injured in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Haunted by this episode, teamed with a linked curiosity about reaching different states of consciousness, Crosswell’s Beyond The Thunderdome is an installation that draws together some dark threads. Crosswell’s work consists of a ‘sculpture’ and around 80 peculiarly comic line drawings. Between a stack of three mattresses the hands and legs of a (plastic) skeleton emerge as ghastly signs. A collection of found objects, including a gold skull, beside the ‘bed’ adds a further sense of the grotesque.

Accompanying all of this is Lucienne Rickard’s No More Heroes Anymore series of drawings familiar to those who viewed her work at the recent Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. After some experimentation, Rickard has discovered that a shiny-on-shiny mix of very soft graphite and architectural drafting film are a good combination for her feverish and time-consuming pencil marks. Dark life-size images of a pit bull terrier, a bull and a bullfighting jacket are illustrative of an interest in brutal sports involving animals. Although she’s uncomfortable with violence, Rickard, inspired by Ernest Hemingway, is fascinated by the intensity of moments shared equally between magnificence and destruction.

Until December 1

MOP Projects, Chippendale

Pic: Joel Crosswell, Beyond the Thunderdome 2013 (Installation detail).

Courtesy the artist and MOP Projects.