Ruler, rete

Designed to function as a series of visually led conversations throughout the gallery spaces, 'Ruler, rete' focussed on points of ideological convergence and material rapports, exploring themes of migration and the telling of histories through new and recent paintings, sculpture and installations by the exhibiting artists.

Ruler, rete takes it’s title from two elements of an instrument called an astrolabe, historically used by navigators and astronomers to identify and locate celestial bodies. An astrolabe consists of a round plate containing a two-dimensional projection of the Earth’s latitudinal lines, upon which rests another circular feature called the rete, which contains the locations of stars and planets. Over that, a straight ruler pivots around to line up with measurements that are marked along the edge of the plate.

The manner in which the ruler and rete function illustrates a notion common to the exhibiting artists: that of establishing means of understanding and interpreting profound source material of physical, historical or emotional realms. The combined polyphony of Gareth Sansom’s narrative paintings and Marian Tubbs’ digital paintings fused into aluminium or illustrate two artists grappling with the legacies of a modernist art historical vernacular and the contemporary proliferation of images via screen based media. Clare Milledge and Tomislav Nikolic offer more intimate explorations of shamanism and memory through painted glass panels and meditative colour field paintings: way-finding tools chartering alternative doctrines and emotive states. In the highly charged works of Daniel Boyd and Zac Langdon Pole, protean legacies of colonisation, routes of memory and simultaneous histories will play out through series of works bearing Boyd’s distinctive pointillist technique and Langdon-Pole’s poignantly altered objects.

Designed to function as a series of visual conversations throughout the gallery spaces, Ruler, rete showcases six contemporary Australian and New Zealand artists working at the forefront of contemporary artistic enquiry.