Kate Mitchell: Future Fallout and Tara Marynowsky: Venus of Venus

Overview

From psychic shopfronts to vintage vaudevillian, it's a strange but compelling world down here.

Currently at Chalk Horse are two solo exhibitions by local artists: Tara Marynowsky's beautiful and ethereal creations and Kate Mitchell's exploration of chance encounters. Marynowsky's small-scale works in Venus of Venus are more than simply pastel shapes on pretty paper. There is something slightly darker looming beneath their quiet elegance. Over the past few years, her work has been influence by her passage into motherhood and its accompanying joys, pains and anxieties.

Her figures are softly outlined and filled in with ghostly watercolour, giving them a spiritual or translucent quality. Some are limbless, while others look like an assemblage of limbs, as opposed to cohesive bodies. With breasts sprouting out of odd places and nipples fringed with flower petals, there is a sense of maternal care and nurturing.

Another aspect of her practice is making additions and alterations to vintage postcards. With eyes embedded in hairnets and veils, clown lipstick, coloured noses, and sharp eyelashes, the women appear slightly vaudevillian, becoming both demure and demonic. In playing with these old cliches of beauty and etiquette, she undercuts them with a sinister humour.

In stark contrast, Kate Mitchell's Future Fallout is a continuation of her performative storytelling and cartoonish happenings. A 47-second film plays on loop, showing Mitchell cycling up to a ‘psychic shop’. As she tries to enter, the set falls down and she hurriedly cycles away again. It as if there is a thwarted narrative here — we assume something is going to happen, but the expected action abruptly falters and changes direction.

Another work, It’s in the Bag, features a glowing orb inside a takeaway bag. This could be a comment on the neatly commoditised ‘new age’ culture of today. There’s also Fell Into It, an intimate little work that might easily be skimmed over as it looks more like stylised wall text. Mitchell narrates a chance encounter with a past murderer who tells his story and then instructs her to carry two rocks (apparently embedded with “quartz and gold”) on her person for seven years. This is a peculiar offering from a stranger with a dark past, yet it as if there is now a contract that exists between them. Interestingly, different temporal states are woven together in this work: each person's past, the present of the agreement, and the unknown future.

Mitchell playfully meditates on chance and futurity, occupying the space between intent and outcome. Her art navigates through life's twists and turns, probing material realities and the ethical choices we make.