Sue Briggs: Venetian Strut

The Blind is Drawn

Sue Briggs’ latest exhibition of works, entitled Venetian Strut, at Free Range is a subtle exhibition of diffusion and re-emergence. The artist, a previously established landscape artist in the state’s Margaret River Region, is re-emerging after her recent Masters studies with a challenging view of both landscape and painting. Briggs’ new works repeatedly confront the viewer with a question about what one is looking at and whether one ought to be looking at, looking through, looking into, or looking beyond the surface of the exhibited works.

Whilst the five small works in the Broome Shutter series maintain a clear reference to a kind of landscape painting that Briggs’ is questioning, in most works, such as the large canvas entitled Blind, the landscape persists essentially within in a kind of pictorial gravity, gently reinforced by horizontals and blue/brown (water/earth/sky?) and textural contrasts. In these works we are brought face to face with the window that is the assumed frame of much of the long history of western landscape painting. With the metaphoric device of the blind or shutter, alluded to in the titles of the exhibition and of the works themselves, Briggs intends to interrupt and diffuse the vistas that prop up a long western tradition of landscape painting.

Throughout the exhibition the viewer will be surprised by the varied traces and mark-making to be found within all the works. Delightful contrasts are to be found between parched, earthy islands of dry browns, luminous beams of warm-golden browns, pools of cool liquid blues, and billowing gaseous clouds that are more a result of process than either shape or colour. Further interest is created by contrasting moments of apparent nature with moments of clearer deliberation and intervention, as seen in the lime-wash white horizontals and verticals in the polyptych Venetian Strut.

It is interesting to know that the two large works on un-stretched canvas (Venetian Strut I and Blind), were an important part of the studio environment from which this exhibition emerged and that they represented a vital presence and stimulus for art-making. Over this present “landscape”, each of the exhibited works is perhaps a like a blind or shutter, filtering and diffusing, but also offering a self-conscious acknowledgement of the act of framing that is necessarily involved in painting.

Briggs’ exhibition may seem to present images that ambiguously suggest scale and scope - many works (for instance) speak to this viewer of a weathered metallic surface, like cold steel and its outcrops of rust and other markings – but ultimately, perhaps, the show is the admission of an experienced painter to a great realization; that there is only so much of the “view” that we can capture. Furthermore, in trying to capture and manage the “view” we obstruct what we were looking at with facsimiles, constructs, frames and scaffolding. As a final humorous post script to a strong show, Briggs presents four small entertaining works titled Venetian Collapse, in which the “blind” is imposed on the image with thick opaque paint from a small roller.

Duncan McKay
12:10:03