Avatar of Sacred Discontent

‘Avatar of Sacred Discontent’ is an unabashedly lyrical exhibition title, and yet it communicates the themes of this group exhibition with admirable economy. Examining the conflict between the sacred and the profane, positioning that conflict at the core of human experience and discontent, it finally suggests that art is an avatar of that tension and condition.

Curated by Wolfe Lenkiewicz and Flora Fairbairn, the show is doggedly ambitious and unafraid of the occasional sweeping statement. It tackles big themes: mortality, religiosity, politics, faith, capitalism, ecology, and innumerable others. More than 30 artists are shown, and what unites the disparate works on display is the tantalization and the frustration of articulating the chasm between the material and the insubstantial, the consecrated and the profane.

Ilona Sagar’s lovely Still Rest (2007) presents a collection of resin casts of individual kisses. Conrad Shawcross’s ‘Drawing (series of 5 drawings)’ (2005) uses one of his machines to convert music into a work on paper, while Alastair Mackie’s Untitled (2007) is a heart composed of wasp spit and wood pulp. There is a strong element of alchemy and conversion inherent to the logic of the exhibition, and elsewhere this is more concretely defined as an interest in illusion and sleight of hand.

Liane Lang’s Pray (2005) presents the image of a figure kneeling in prayer at a domestic altar; everything in the photograph is authentic apart from the figure itself, which is a silicone dummy. Meanwhile, Jason Shulman’s Halo (2007) employs optical illusion in order to grant a single candle an unearthly (and unnervingly consistent) double halo. The illusion, these works seem to imply, is located in the matter of our faith itself.

But illusion is not simply inherent to what we believe in; it is located in our very need to believe, in our compulsion to rely on structures of faith in order to organize our experience of the world. A key work in the exhibition is Tobias Collier’s Model of the Universe no. 3 (Exponential Agrophrenia) (2007), comprising a mess of glittering pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, crammed into a tilting birdcage and tumbling down onto the floor of the gallery. It may imply hopeless cacophony and chaos, but it also posits a totality to be reconstructed – piece by piece. It is a neat, and ultimately very moving, summation of our relationship to faith, of the human striving that persists, against the contrasting evidence that surrounds us.

Katie Kitamura