Detail of a frame from James Lynch's animation I Was Running and Running.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Until May 15
In a beautiful work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Mira Gojak has dismembered two decorative wardrobes from decades ago, revealing the integrity of ornament and structure. Thin members connect like pencil lines to provide the outline of the interlocking wardrobes in real space.
Then Gojak takes plastic chairs, cuts them into filaments and arranges them like ribs in descending rhythms. The disfigured chairs acquire a strange biomorphic character, as of a skeleton. Finally, Gojak assembles light bulbs in bunches under a yellow membrane that makes them seem charged with a life-force, as if having grown or as if constituting a seed or fruit.
These clever works are about deconstruction not because they pull something apart, but because they reveal a ritualised basis of institutionalised objects. They're beautiful and compelling, with a curious and inquiring spirit that transfuses most of the installations in New 05 at ACCA. The works aren't all equally moving, but they collectively suggest a deconstructive slant on objects and media - theorised but also intuitive - that presents new imaginative challenges.
James Lynch has prepared a cinema to stage his naive animations, mostly featuring a bearded gentle soul who recalls episodes in a quiet melancholy style. You enter the makeshift tiers, built from pine and supporting assorted kitchen and lounge-room chairs, beanbags and cushions.
The sequences seem to begin with photo-capture but are then mostly reconstituted by hand as an animation. You can see the joins where the artist has cut out a figure to act in several frames where the background remains consistent. They're like the little gaps in fresco, known as "giornate".
With such fragmented bites, a woman races in Wagnerian distemper to fetch a coffee pot and minister to the communicants; a man gets up from the hay and tends some goats; a couple prepare their luggage; a man recalls in the schoolyard how he ran to fetch a coffee pot. The homespun subject matter goes with the disjointed technique and the homespun cinematic ambience: they're all domesticated, in some way showing how film - no matter how dramatic - is assimilated in the lounge. We experience all emotional catastrophes in comfort and we insert our own image as the protagonist.
This homespun air is echoed in Kathy Temin's project, where a model of the artist's house stands among furette trees. The edifice is opened out like a doll's house so you peer into the interiors. The rooms contain videos or installations from Temin's earlier projects; so the house is actually the gallery, the studio, the headspace.
Meanwhile, Destiny Deacon puts you in an uncomfortable institutional room with a sickly light, so that you seem to be walking into a black-and-white photograph. Your skin is grey; everything is sapped of chroma. Videos punctuate the eerie silence with the thump of dolls descending from a slide and angry voices periodically saying "Why are you here?" or "What are you looking at?"
You feel that you're in a place that isn't yours, that alienates you, that casts you in the wrong light. The work deconstructs white supremacy.
For me, this has the impact that Stuart Ringholt's work lacks, which is a curious diaristic account of drug-induced mental illness. But the presentation is unlike the beautiful confessional character of the text: it's obscure in a wilfully arty way, undermining the strong sympathy generated by the voice.
I feel similarly with Mutlu Cerkez' self-portraits and archives, where the mix of directness and obscurity seems unpoetic.
For the show as a whole, the curator Max Delany emphasises "the subjectivity of the artist" in a world where "corporate mass-market culture reigns supreme".
It's a robust and relevant agenda, which needs to remain NEW beyond '05.