Through a looking glass, darkly

Artist Samantha Everton, a 2003 graduate of the rigorous RMIT Bachelor of Photography course, demonstrated a daring lack of humility in her third solo exhibition, hung late last year at Melbourne’s Gasworks Art Park.

Most “emerging talents” would be happy to simply have an audience show up. Everton inveigled them to put in some hard cerebral yards once they got there, like it or not!

The exhibition in question, titled Catharsis, is a series in which two women characters, one oriental and the other occidental, reoccur and occasionally interface in a eye-squintingly dark, vaguely disturbing historical setting. They seem both detached and unhappy. The dark, sumptuous spaces they inhabit are claustrophobic and full of dread.

The precision of Everton’s digital manipulation and her control of visual continuity through the Catharsis series is characteristically impeccable. (Everton’s skill with the computer mouse is as critical to her work as a draftsperson’s touch with an HB.)

Everton goes to extraordinary lengths to bring her visions to reality. Her work can be a composite of up to eight or nine separate images melded together to create something completely different… Photo-surrealism? She once grew a thick bright green thatch of grass over the surfaces of an armchair to realise one of her more light-hearted ideas. She has taken a calculated risk in presenting Catharsis in a severely darkened room, with just sufficient light pooled on each of the 20 or so works to catch the eye.

“Catharsis is a real installation piece, with the exhibition walls being black and each individual image selectively spotted and highlighted by many small lights. The exhibition is pitch black when you walk in, and only time will reveal all,” she explained.

This is likely to exasperate or frustrate some viewers, but patience brings rewards. Stay awhile and the eyes adjust to the gloomy surroundings, revealing more detail. However, it’s not until you engage with the pictures one by one that the device of putting intrinsically dark, subdued images in a darkened room proves itself to be more than just an artist’s contrariant conceit.

The viewer must “read” the photographs, from left to right, top to bottom, much as the laser “eye” in a digital scanner accumulates image detail. Consequently, each picture wins a bit of quality time, as the viewer is compelled to pore over every square inch of the composition.

Some pictures are less enigmatic than others. Possession, in which the eastern woman is posed in the midst of a richly appointed room, with an open, gilded cage in the background, alludes to both colonialism and class politics.

The gilded cage crops up in images featuring the western woman as well, perhaps alluding to her own underlying state of chatteldom.

Catharsis is an exciting progression in Everton’s development. Until now she has been creating clever, painstaking and technically perfect digital manipulations, because she can. She is now marrying those hard-won skills to more complex themes, perhaps because she must.