Sydney artist Tom Polo has garnered a reputation for high-chromo, edgy installations that transform the way we engage with a gallery’s space.
While his canvases and drawings are loose and gestural, there is nothing off-the-cuff about this extremely considered exhibition that takes viewers on a journey.
For in a part of your mind, I am you, Polo has transformed Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery into a series of theatrical acts that are clearly demarcated through shifting carpet and wall colours. So immediately he sets up this push and pull between a homey, personal space, and one that is extroverted, and loves to perform.
With each room there is a different tone, and a different set of stage directions, if you like, for the viewer, that we intuitive enact. One becomes both protagonist and player. When we think of performativity, it is usually in the realm of the performing arts, but Polo’s capacity to blend and blur genres in an abstract way is refreshing and exciting.
In the first gallery, or act, Polo unveils new works largely made in a recent residency in New York (US). A suite of drawings at varying scales, they use the concept of a window to frame and crop, but also a psychological space between viewing in, and looking out. Here the tones are beige, grey and earthy – unexpected for Polo – and, if anything, the new framed drawings feel a little flat.
Tom Polo: accompanying artists
Using a cohesive curatorial device, Polo returns the viewer to the window in the last gallery – this time with a work by Ugo Rondinone. It absorbs the viewer into its narrative through its mirrored surface, and also reflects back onto the scene played out before it.
Across the exhibition Polo plays with the idea of a ghost presence, and as viewers start to fall into a choreographed dance with the works, that presence is both the artist and their own evocations.
Rondinone’s work is one of three pieces loaned from the Art Gallery of NSW – along with works by Tracey Emin and Urs Fischer – that aim to deepen the conceptual muscle of the show. While the motivation for their inclusion is understandable, I ponder whether they are necessary. The exhibition is strong enough on its own merits.
This is made clear by the two central galleries that are almost like binaries: in one a flotilla of large, free-standing, abstract canvases are presented in a sea of high chroma blue carpet and walls, while the next gallery is a washout in soft greys, inviting a mood shift to the introspective space.
Tom Polo: influences
Polo cites Italian theatre as an influence, but these devices of staging, colour and lighting are relatable for any viewer. Moving between his standing canvases – some of which reach back to his 2019 exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, when he first played out this installation style – they are reminiscent of theatre flats and players. The blue or green screens reference film and the idea of potentiality or an unfolding narrative. Breaking the magic for me are the wire hangers still on the verso of some canvases (obviously deliberate given Polo’s attention to detail), which feel like they have been borrowed back for this staging.
In the grey gallery – or the fourth act in this piece of theatre – a pair of canvases are stretched with a fragile mirror film, which place the viewer both in front of, and then behind, drawn elements. Viewers are seemingly absorbed as players in their narrative.
Polo created the wall-drawing over a five-day period using oil crayon. Wallpaper eyes pull us into a kind of colour-bleached psychedelia, added to as the lights in the room slowly pulse from bright to moody. Polo says the installation, in part, references his father’s partial loss of sight and how such human vulnerabilities prey on our confidence and introversion.
That flipping between active and passive viewing is consistent across the exhibition, and one becomes increasingly alert to its nuances moving through the show. And, like any good play, this piece of theatre ends in a dramatic crescendo.
Along with Rondinone’s aforementioned mirrored frames, Polo presents a new, large-scale, multi-panel painting – his largest work to date. Facing it is a theatre of child-sized chairs in his favourite blue on fiery red carpet. It is a powerful wallop to the retina.
Sound is dampened by the carpet. The chairs speak to the absent, and some carry small portraits on their backs – almost like reserve signs or doppelgangers for their missing sitters. We are encouraged to move around this space, with it shifting dramatically at every angle.
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in a part of your mind, I am you maps out 15 years of Polo’s practice, and yet it is so seamless it could pass as a new body of work. Generosity feels a two-way street in this exhibition, and the experience of its viewing stays with you long after leaving the gallery. It is clear why Polo is a celebrated painter of his generation.
in a part of your mind, I am you
Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
28 July–24 August
Free
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