Karena Keys, Helen Shelley, Tye McBride & Ben Byrne

Overview

This week at Firstdraft sees the opening of three new shows. Galleries 1 and 2 provide Karena Keys and Helen Shelley with the space to explore faith and constructed belief systems as physical representations in paint and its lateral definitions. Their two-person exhibition, The Otherings conjures up images of tribal ambiguity asking us to explore our own worship, religious or secular.

Similarly, Tye McBride asks us to question the way in which we construct our knowledge of the world. Her exhibition, 149597870 references the number of kilometres it would take to traverse the distance from the earth to the sun. As a child, I used to lay in bed at night getting myself lost in conceptual knots over how stories could exist right here in my house and not elsewhere (don't you wish you knew me at 10!) and then I would forget the question and I would lose my place and not be able to get back to where I started from or had got to. Anyway, I feel that McBride's offering may be a little like this — it seems that the sun is so very far away from here and now — all 149597870 kilometres away —  and yet how the hell did they work that out? I can see Indiana Jones starting out from Antarctica, stepping off as the crow flies with his wooden measuring wheel. Ah yep.

Last to tie that conceptual knot is Ben Byrne with Tumult in Gallery 4. Here Byrne explores noise — the noise within us, outside of us — we are surrounded but not really listening at all. We cannot shut it off for we are a part of every sound ever present. I often think of this idea in connection to our eyes. How is it that our eyes see everything within their vision and yet it is our brains that fail to pick up the slack — how in fact could we ever miss anything?

And so ends Big Questions 101 for this week. You never know, some answers might lie at Firstdraft. That's where we will start anyway.