Diann Bauer

10 January - 16 February 2003

For Diann Bauer's exhibition she has taken the gallery space and cleaved it in two. One half is a public, inhabitable, temporal space; the other is a remote, unreachable, fictional space only available to be occupied optically, which is done through a small aperture. The work is more than an exercise in a scaled up camera obscura, though formally it represents a cross between Duchamp's 'Etant Donnes' and a symbolic, mise en scene, pictorial tableau.

Bauer had always been most comfortable working with gritty, faintly grotesque, lascivious imagery and juxtaposing it within a real and psychological landscape, sometimes drawn from her antipathy of her own Americana culture. Her work 'Fashion Disasters' 2001 depicted just that - fashion and disaster. Here she juxtaposes the ameliorating and fetishised effects of a billowing airbrush painted sky, which forms the backdrop for a scaled-down, model, urban cityscape, with a vast remaking of a 19th Century print by the Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi depicting the Samurai warrior in full traditional garb impaling himself.

The viewer shares the space with the complex, wall size Samurai and looks through into the darker, cavernous cityscape via one of the eyes in the painting. Delineating a contrast between subcultural, modern and traditional image making - East with West, the painting reinforces the contemporaneity of Kuniyoshi's print and its antecedence to current day manga, cartoon and graphic depictions of violence, animation and graffiti whilst displacing the setting of the model city as something distant, alluring and forbidden.

San Uchijimi No Uchi (detail) 2003
Acrylic, enamel, ink, MDF, chipboard,timber, glass lens