This work is more beautiful than it is bleak, more ingenious than existential, and the engagement it desires is aligned more with the politics of identity than the dialectics of isolation.
Sally–Ann Rowland
Born 1974, Adelaide, South Australia
The condition of silence and the depiction of absence are two of the most potent devices in the avant–garde repertoire, not unbefitting of the secret codes of modern art. The installation work of Sally-Ann Rowland is a chip off the old psychoanalytic block, a kind of waiting game in which all but the most minimal of narrative devices situate the work on the edges of memory – a mnemonic event–horizon, where time and space take on the qualities of slippage not unlike those experienced by Dave, the spaceman in 2001 – A Space Oddessy.
It's hard to imagine there was a subconscious prior to the analogical conjunction of dwelling places and the mind. The sparse anonymous room in which, "Real objects are altered, the familiar imbued with a strangeness that occurs in dreams", * is a potent signifier of the unconscious whose secret occupant is invariably absent yet whose apparent presence is indicated in the few objects that populate the 'space', but which are perversely thwarted in their state of becoming; books with two spines, drawers without handles and chess pieces in treacle, the absent kings rendering the game futile and unending.
This work is more beautiful than it is bleak, more ingenious than existential, and the engagement it desires is aligned more with the politics of identity than the dialectics of isolation.
James Moss from his Samstag catalogue essay, The World is not Enough
2000 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2000 MFA, Columbia University, New York, USA
1997 Bachelor of Visual Arts, South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide
1996 Bachelor of Arts (Honours), The University of Adelaide
Artist's website
http://sallyannrowland.com/
