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Contemporary Showcase II

Decoy Café Bar Gallery, 303 Exhibition St, Melbourne

28 June - 19 August 2011

In our second Contemporary Showcase on the walls of Decoy Café, the 26 works by CAS Inc. members included paintings, prints, drawings, and low-relief ceramics and bronzes. Subject and media varied, from political satire, to themes of nature and domesticity. Jill M. Anderson's ceramic portrayal of Julia Gillard, as three flying ducks on the wall, was greeted with much hilarity the moment it was hung. Her second work, Superficially Green Studio Scraps, made of earthenware tiles on plywood, was a satire on rubbish and recycling. The clay forms of junk included plastic bottles, bits of tyres and tubing - and a couple of items that should definitely not be added to the domestic rubbish!


 

Of Denise Dempsey's ink & pen drawing, titled Australian Character, one may think by the title that it could be some Aussie bloke, but it was actually on the natural and domestic theme of still life, a very nicely drawn and delicately coloured vase of dried Australian native plants and flowers.



On the same theme, but very differently handled, was Ellsworth Overton's oil painting of a House of No Laminex, a timber house on tree trunk stilts, in a bush and farmland setting. Mandy Hopkins' acrylic on canvas, A Pear A Tif, looked like a pear suspended in champagne, with its silvery textural background and spatterings of silver paint.




On different subjects again were Suzanne Kaldor's pair of hanging bronzes, entitled Torso - back and front view, and Genesis by Brigitta Wolfram, a mixed media collage. There were also two block prints by Nick Dell'Oso, and many fine paintings by various other CAS members. A very pleasing show.

Review by Cressida Fox

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