Recent works by Glenn Morgan and Caspar Zika

An impressively spacious two-storey exhibition space in Richmond, Place Gallery pairs together an established social commentator and a young video artist in this engaging show.

The main exhibition room at Place Gallery holds works by Glenn Morgan, whose sprawling landscapes are weighed down by a cacophony of social issues – environmental disasters, politics, government housing, refugees, etc. Each work is peppered with quotes floating up from some of the hundreds of characters, words of anger, desperation, love, humour. In their cartoonish exuberance, Morgan’s works are at the same time whimsical and frightening.

Dominating Glenn Morgan’s collection is an enormous four-panel work, which spans almost the entire length of the space. The work reads somewhat like a Herald Sun issued version of the Bayeux Tapestry, with major political and environmental events of the last couple of years simplified and personalised in a visceral response to a tumultuous period in Australian history. The dialogue splashed across Global Warming is, as with his other works, sharp and evocative – ‘Do Something!’ and ‘The Kids!’ float pointedly above a ravaged and gnarled landscape. Yet alongside desperation is humour – one character comments on the poor lifebuoy-throwing skills in a rescue attempt, while Tony Abbott regrets forgetting his ‘budgie smugglers’.

Morgan’s works are all intensely personal (his love of Geelong Football Club manages to worm its way into several pieces), and quite aggressively Australian. It’s fitting that an artist like Morgan should be shown in a gallery whose name is ‘Place’; his work is such an intricate series of comments on Morgan’s places, which happen to be places his audience populates and therefore fully understands.

Above the main room of the gallery is a smaller space, in which Caspar Zika’s video works Light Translation #3 and Light Translation #4 are installed. Both works take domestic lighting as their subjects – in one, two desk lamps flicker at each other and in the other an unshaded bulb swings on its cord – and seek to explore the lost past of interior spaces over time.

On entering the room, the schizophrenic movement of light in the space is overwhelming, potentially seizure-inducing. What’s interesting is how interpretation of the installation shifts, from shielding oneself against the attack of the strobe effect, to being totally enthralled by an emerging love story between lamps left alone in an abandoned space.

There is a playful humour at work here, a kind of ‘what happens when we’re not looking’ cheekiness between the lamps that is certainly very endearing, and forces us to wonder why we can’t stop ourselves assigning human characteristics to inanimate objects. Light Translation #3’s light globe is a dynamic and energetic dancer. In Light Translation #4, Zika’s lamps use Morse code to communicate with each other, further reinforcing the idea that we need familiar narratives in what we are viewing for them to make a lasting impression, and even to make sense.

As Zika’s videos expose the romance of animated lamps, they hint at a bigger exploration – that of the ghosts left behind as spaces are changed and redesigned over time. Stripping back the layers of history in a space, these works literally show us that what we may find is familiar, yet ultimately indecipherable to us. Something happened here, but we have no desire for the exact details. So in the end all that’s really left is the interplay of light and dark, and imagination.

Glenn Morgan: Paintings and Sculptures
Caspar Zika: .-.. ..- -.. . -. ...
Place Gallery, Richmond
October 12 – November 5
www.placegallery.com.au