Erik Edson, video still, fable, 2004. Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Exhibitions
Erik Edson: fable
Contemporary Feature Gallery
26 June - 29 August 2004
Erik Edson presented a new multi-media environment incorporating projection, staged forms and a pair of historical landscape paintings selected from the permanent collection. While his previous series, dwelling, focused on the contingent state of habitation in the landscape, fable emphasised the narrative capacity of nature and its value-laden trajectory through culture. Edson's goal (and method) of productive confusion of representational conventions exposed the means by which we attempt to make sense of our place in the world, and of the world's place in the cosmos.
Edson's fable did not offer pat lessons or codes of behaviour. Using the devices of the peep show and the stock figure, Edson presented a theatrical zone of unexpected encounters within the gallery. We are welcomed by an unlikely host: a life-size taxidermied form of a bear with a bright skin of patterned fabric. In a constructed inner sanctum, a gigantic shadow-play of the pathetic, hobbled walk of a wind-up toy elephant suggested epic struggle and dysfunction, echoing the contrived distress of Gaspard Dughet's 17th-century A Poetical Landscape with Figures Illustrating the Fable of the Sun and the Wind, which hung nearby.
Jan Allen