“Baseline: Remnant Grasslands at Weereewa/Lake George”
VISUAL ART
Craft ACT, Level 1, 180 London Circuit, Civic Square, until August 23.
“The Fall of Night: A Group Exhibition”
Helen Maxwell Gallery, 42 Mort Street, Braddon, until August 2.
Reviewed by Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak

“VIVID” is not the only game in town and in Gallery 1, at the Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre (above CMAG), the works of textile artist Beth Hatton and painter Christine James are an inspired pairing.
In multi-panel panoramas, James employs oil on Belgium linen to record the remaining vegetation of the Weereewa/Lake George region. Vegetation becomes medium as Hatton combines native and introduced species with linen thread and Aboriginal stitching techniques to construct objects that embody concepts of change and resilience.
These are richly textured, finely executed works, layered with meaning as in “Introducing species (Settlement Series)”, 2007, 24x33x20cm, where Scotch thistle, Yorkshire fog, redanther wallaby grass and allocasuarina seeds are transformed into an oversized shoe.
At Helen Maxwell, 11 photographers document mankind’s apparent rush to self destruct. Amongst fine company are; eX de Medici with twin, large-format photographs “It’s a Global World 1 and 2” (digital photographs on vinyl 130 x 197 cm).
Documentary images of urban warfare, more familiar as magazine or television stills, are transformed, through excessive scale with pixels as large as open wounds fracturing the photograph’s surface, into cartoon nightmare.
Micky Allan and Steenus Von Steensen in “The Fall of Night I-IV”, (2008 inkjet prints on paper), montage Canberra’s night skyline, lake and bush textures into a Pink Floydesque shiver of apprehension. Tony Coleing presents three wonderfully realised 66 x100 cm image inkjet prints on Hahnemule paper, particularly “Can you confirm our position”, where much happens in the play of light and dark and where the thrill of beauty is swiftly undercut by the dark message.