Essay

Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) – Josey Kidd–Crowe

By Susan McMinn BVA Hon Visual Arts

Josey Kidd–Crowe’s exhibition, Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) consists of three components where, painting, installation and video takes you through a fragmented journey of memory and thought. Occupying two gallery spaces, paintings are intimately shown in the small space, whilst an installation of both video and small objects and relics are exhibited within the larger space, located opposite. The positioning of the different components is just as important as each art work. The paintings intend to capture random images of present thought whilst the ephemera engage past memory. The video offers a means of escape from the possibility of painful collective memory.

 

At first it would appear that the work of Kidd-Crowe throws caution to the wind. His loosely rendered paintings are executed with similar rapidity in which ambiguous thought and imagery enters and leaves the mind. In his paintings, Kidd-Crowe merges reality with the imaginary. His paintings are created quickly to emphasise the intensity of an emotional experience.

 

There is certain abstraction and yet an alluring figurative element to his work. The paintings are not fussed over and yet they are considered. Kidd-Crowe comments, ‘Though they are confused’ they are ‘decidedly confused’. On the small hardwood surface a raw narrative of primal of human emotion is expressed within the painted image. For Kidd-Crowe the painting process becomes personal. As he paints, he leaves behind a portrayal of imagery illustrating a yearning to capture the unknown. A succession of marks plays out a loosely rendered surreal narrative that engages with both the figure and elements of abstraction. Within the expressive mark making, he passionately explores subconscious thought associated with feelings of love, hate, regret and disgust. This is evident in the central painting, Untitled #3, 2009, where red hued vortexes thought spew forth to the edges of the picture plane; eyes gaze back at the viewer. Palpable iconography particular to the female body explores sexuality. Kidd-Crowe unashamedly reveals those very thought processes that would otherwise be kept hidden.

 

Whilst his paintings convey a catharsis of emotion, Kidd-Crowes ephemeral installation suggests the source. Found and made personal objects collected over time, and relics particular to the past, form a narrative of ones personal history touching issues of memory and the self. These are juxtaposed with portrait drawings on National Geographic magazine paper and a video. The way in which these three elements are arranged places emphasis on past memory and our desire to escape to another world. For me, on the one hand, entering this room made me feel as though I had entered a cosmos of privacy. Not unlike entering into someone’s bedroom, I felt somewhat like an intruder. And yet once I was ‘in’ I felt compelled to look and engage with the relics as they tapped into my own memory.

 

The objects and relics in Illuminations convey their own ambiguous story and embody unseen past memories and experience. Inherent in these objects is the suggestion of a previous owner and the representation of a personal history contained within. For the artist, inclusion of the object alludes to the absence of the figure and something that cannot be grasped:

‘Maybe if the elusive truth these objects contain could be grasped, the vague yearning for the unknown could be satisfied…perhaps the paintings are an attempt to exorcise the objects meanings’.¹

 

Here, contained within these objects and relics is another life and a personal past history that may never be revealed. Moreover, not unlike his paintings, Kidd-Crowe arranges these objects selectively. A string of pearls could suggest gender as does a worn pair of men’s leather shoes. Burning candles are placed atop of each shoe, perhaps suggesting the loss of a former generation. Leaves protruding from a wooden object suggest nature whilst a skull adorned with pearls and green glass fuses human-animal relationship. A broken fence picket and a small family photograph depicting mother and child, the ideal of family and melancholy. Small, yet dim lights positioned throughout the installation illuminate that which is hidden in our collectables and memories.

 

The feeling of nostalgia experienced within the space was disrupted however, with portrait drawings on glossy magazine paper placed alongside the objects and relics. Kidd-Crow utilised the typically remote, yet beautiful landscapes particular to National Geographic, to appeal to his audience a means of escape to an ideal ‘otherworld’. According to Kidd-Crowe the drawings are symbolic of our yearning to connect with ‘nature’ and the natural world. The drawings are surreal portraits with psychological connotations. Extraordinary figures loom from sublime landscapes and beaches. The raw emotions of thought evoked within the portraits are expressed in the paintings.

 

Similar to the desire for escape, evoked by the placement of the portrait drawings on lush landscape backgrounds, a video installation titled ‘Climbing’, 2009, explores the unsatisfied desire for the sublime. Through nature and the natural world, the film begins with serene imagery that begins to snap and jump as the film journeys through a chaotic array of movement, transcending into still calm of blue sky and cloud. Watching ‘Climbing’, I was captivated by the appearance of the void created by the close filming of the tree branches and distant sky. This is enhanced by particular movement created during filming such as the transition of sudden jerky circular motion to tranquillity.

 

Kidd-Crowe acknowledges an influence from American painter Forrest Bess and Swiss installation artist Carol Bove. He is attracted to the obscurity conveyed within the work of Australian painter Ian Fairweather. In the same way Kidd-Crowe rapidly paints thought and imagery as they come to mind, Bess terms himself a visionary painter and ‘makes no conscious effort to paint’. He closes his eyes and paints colour line pattern and form, copying them as they come to mind ‘exactly without elaboration’.² For Kidd-Crowe, Carol Bove’s interest in the sense of history contained within an object is not unlike his own desire to imagine the collective personal history or memory hidden within his own installation of objects and relics.³

 

Illuminations is a collective reflection of thought and memory presented in figurative abstraction. Although the figure is not present within the installation, the remains of the figures memory embody the space. Kidd-Crowe challenges the viewer with self examination as his works conveys a catharsis of emotion, a narrative of a collective personal past, and a means of escape. This exhibition touches on human primal emotions through the exploration of that which most of us would secretly keep hidden.