2 Exhibitions

Overview

As the City of Sydney pioneered filling empty spaces with arts at a peppercorn rent, the Paper Mill pioneered filling that space, dealing with the City as landlord, as well as the business of exhibitions and art workshops. It all seemed to go quite well. Its former directors have been ruminating on the months since its closure, resulting in their exhibition Ex Post Facto ("after the acheivement"), sharing space with Justin Balmain's In Case We Never Meet.

Ex Post Facto is a collection of oddments. Stephanie Peters' Junk Drawer has a model railway apartment jut out of the hollow of a drawer, greenery and garden included. An inevitable closing threatens to wipe out its domesticity. Christopher Hodge's Painting to Indicate physicality i,ii,iii collects three canvases, two abstract, one ruminating on the "hip new" versus a "new hip," while Kate Campbell's video work, Bifurcation Home, follows two halves of a house down a freeway, moving on trailers theat seem briefly parted and barely separate. Siân McIntyre's "...if you keep on walking" slides sylvester Stallone's face under wallpaper-like patterns. Stuck onto mirrors, they line up along a shelf in readiness to Stallonify a kitchen.

Star of the show is Laura Pike's Map Study. Four maps: Hurstville, Canterbury, North Head and the CBD are cut into coloured projections, the paper fringes cut clean away, leaving only a spider web of streets behind. In the holes formerly filled by these urban blocks, dark abstract shapes loom through the paper.

Justin Balmain's In Case We Never Meet sets dual cameras following the images of two running lovers. Looping through George Street and the Galeries, they look for one other, push deftly around people and fail to meet. Their running is absorbing, dragging you over their shoulders to follow across shiny night streets and through indifferent crowds.

Image: Still from In Case We Never Meet by Justin Balmain. © the artist.