Realm
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 3, 2008
REALM
Helen Gory Galerie, 23 St Edmonds Rd, Prahran. Tel: 9525 2808. helengory.com. Until Aug 9, Tue-Sat 11am-6pm.It must be hard for Morgan Allender to describe her work. Basically, she paints nature, which probably equated to social suicide in the art department at uni. "What? You don't eat paint and vomit it up? You don't deconstruct the art object?" Anyway, she made it through and, lucky for us, her large-scale canvases are on show right now at Helen Gory. Dark, epic, foreboding. . . err, floral arrangements. Not glib or ironic in any way, these abstracted floral studies avoid even commenting on sentimentality. They're just scary. The kind of thing David Lynch might produce if he really got into Renaissance still life. Set against deep, black backgrounds and muted by thin glaze, the flowers seem to emanate their own light. Allender says she's responding to her dislocation from nature, having moved here from rural South Australia. But you suspect she's never leaving Gotham - the flowers are sad, uneasy and fading, like a memory.
© 2008 The Sunday Age