‘Light Duty’ - Blindside, 23 May- 15 June, 2024
Essay by Edwina Preston
Rachael Robb’s work is about many things, but central to it is the notion of the co-location of time. Different decades, different centuries, trip each other up and mark each other out in these paintings, sometimes dislocating or disorienting the viewer, but often reorienting us in ways both personally and collectively meaningful. In the process, time becomes not a fact so much as a phenomenon.
Though there is a sense of the viewer being tricked by Robb’s play with time, her engagement with time is more about experiences of the uncanny: odd and inexplicable sensations such as de-ja-vu in which memory manifests as a sudden, fleeting, momentarily displacing jolt. We have lived here before. Or experienced this before. Or known this before. Time dissolves and expands and ruptures in these works, becoming, in the process, almost olfactory, in that it conjures memory and associations mysteriously; is sensed rather than rationally apprehended or understood. It is as though we have briefly slipped through the looking glass only to return curiously altered but not necessarily wiser.
Objects manifest equally mysteriously: a fragment of crumpled paper containing a cryptic message from 1996 referencing the year 2010; album cover artwork from 1990; a cheap white dinner candle with an 8-hour burning life; the sticky decal from a recently eaten Pink Lady apple. Who knows what the cryptic message originally meant, or whether the vinyl is still intact within the album cover, or whether the life of the candle proved to be eight hours or seven or nine.
The Pink Lady apple is long gone, but the sticker remains testament to its existence, refusing to be consigned to the past-tense. It is both a time-stamp and a marker of provenance, persisting outside of its realm of perceived value, and strangely, paradoxically, animate in its beetle-like crawl for refuge from the intensity of Ruben’s Medusa.
The profane occupies the same plane as the sacred in Light Duty; and the ephemeral is accorded equal status to the enduring. In Prague Snow (1993) and Fly, a fly casts a shadow alongside a time-marked photo of a Prague statue; a scrawl of wall graffiti might prove to be as enduring as a medieval fountain; a bulb of garlic echoes the tones in a sepia-coloured portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Robb’s Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Cross’ postcard with thumbprint is a reworking of a thumb-smudged postcard of Malevich’s 1915 Black Cross but also a reference to Melbourne artist John Nixon’s early cross paintings. The chronology of references in Robb’s work matters less than their co-location: all times exist in the same time, and hierarchies of time and aesthetics are displaced. Foregrounds and backgrounds disrupt temporal chronology: Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Still #11’ is a background to Goya’s ‘They carried her off!’ from ‘Los Caprichos’; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower, Female Head Study shunts Sonic Youth into partial shadow. Past and present co-exist, with the painting surface becoming time’s arbiter or equaliser.
Robb’s work is sprinkled, peppered, with dates that are meaningful, but are also alterable, moveable, capable of disrupting temporal locatedness. They function as temporal manoeuvres. In ‘You and I are Earth: Plate 2061’, Robb depicts a 1661 Delft plate unearthed from a London sewer (sewers, mud and earth being the keepers of time) re-marked with the date 2061. With this simple act of re-dating, the plate becomes both a relic of the future and a relic of the past. It is an anachronism: an object existing where it shouldn’t be. But it’s also imbued with personal significance and portent: 2061, a possible imagined date of the artist’s death.
Objects have the curious talismanic power of harbouring time within them. We want to touch the stones of Stonehenge, as though they will transmit some past vibration into our hands. This hand-touching — or finger-tip-touching – across centuries provides an experience of connectedness: that other people lived here, and touched these objects, and exchanged them amongst themselves. Objects can act as portals or thresholds between times, in which the boundaries dissolve and times and places prove to have been traversable all along. Stones and passageways and pottery remain long after the humans who used them or built them or ate from them are gone. It’s no accident that there are no portraits in Robb’s collection.
White, in all its tones and nuances, is used as subtle connective tissue between these works. It might be best seen as the colour of time, or as a colour that allows for the seepage of time. There is a ghostliness in white: it veils, and yet it can also be passed through. We understand white not as a colour but as a ‘shade’, literally a ‘ghost’. It acts here as a transmitter of time, via which we might transport deeper into the past or, more curiously, forwards into the future. In many cultures, white is also the colour of death – or the colour in which a person is transported from death to the grave or pyre — and questions of mortality and immortality are eerily present in these paintings.
The lingering, hovering, delicacy of life, apparent in both its detritus and in the enduring works of art history Robb re-works, is given space for reflection here. Looking at the works requires, or produces, a certain meditativeness. You have to be still to register simultaneously the evanescent and the deep stretch of time in your body.
Rachael ‘s exhibition is titled ‘Light Duty’. The execution of these works is painstaking, but the effect produced is one of lightness. There is nothing heavy about the intention behind these paintings either, though they are not in any way lightly conceived. The depiction of contemporary detritus alongside revered works of art is not aesthetic punning, intended ironically – the present elbowing the past and reminding it how long-gone it is — but a reminder of the life in all things, large or small. What is alive and what is dead? A crumpled and uncrumpled sheet of paper – thrown away and then revived — is re-attributed with mysterious portent. A bloodless white ‘ghost’ heart is in fact an organ of renewal for patients in need of heart transplants. A plastic disposable water bottle seems actively alive with its string of moving bubbles.
The presence of a fly, a garlic bulb, a cheap dinner candle are prescient messages about the brevity of life, the curious ephemerality of all things, the lightness, ultimately, of our presence here. Life goes on in these paintings in small connected ways; in silent but lively conversations conducted across the centuries.
Shrine-like in conception, and in their framing, the paintings in Light Duty are intimate, portable, devotional objects, conceivably small enough to carry, replete with personal meaning and significance — possibly carriageable through time themselves.
Robb paints objects that traverse people. Not the other way around. As all objects are, in fact, traversers of people. Our conception that we are the ones in control is an illusion. These are time-travelling works in which we are the only still points.