Shimmer
Group show, National Art School, Sydney, September 2023
Armando Chant, Anna Mould, Stephanie Houghton
Curated by Maryanne Coutts
Shimmer brings together three artists who are at varying points in their postgraduate experience at the National Art School, from MFA and DFA and beyond. While across the school the postgraduate cohorts at NAS have extremely varied practices, there are always exciting cross pollinations and interconnections. This exhibition explores a resonance between 3 artists whose work shimmers. Many of these works change with the light and as we move around them. They are often a play between two contrasting, but not opposite, considerations or elements and they ask us to think about what it feels like to see.
For Anna Mould iridescence is a metaphor for multiplicitous reality. Iridescent substances such as an insect wing, an abalone shell, an oil slick on wet asphalt, hover between the surface and illusions of depth; depths appear to rise and the surface is subsumed as light effects shift and shimmer before our eyes. Anna uses this phenomenon of iridescence to visualise and navigate binaries, opposition, contradiction, and paradox. She describes this dialectical experience as a visual and cerebral "shimmer "and uses interactions between both materials and ideas to simulate iridescent effects.
