Install View: Underground Gallerysmith, Melbourne
Return to the album index pageUNDERGROUND
Underground continues Eisler’s relentless quest to understand and explore concepts of time, space and form and above all transformation and change. Change is a fundamental property of the universe and the concepts we construct to understand this emerge from our mental efforts to organize the changing world around us.
Underground is not only a construct for the hidden layers of matter beneath our feet and consequent layers of history but also for the human unconscious.
Underground is a series of individual works but also a series of fragments of history and evolution and possibly in sum another form of representation – a garden, a strange place, a dark corner of the mind.
Underground is a theory of everything and yet nothingness. Underground is presence and absence. Underground is a gallery exhibition and a museum display.
Look closely, the works could be relics, vestiges, remnants of an ancient forest where the trees have collapsed, everything has transformed to dust and all that is left is armour and exoskeletons Or are new kinds of creatures emerging even mutations, or are these the structures and objects left by unknown tribes? Are we looking at animals, humans or simply mineral forms? Illusion aside, whatever these forms are and represent, the overwhelming emphasis is on the idea of the hidden, on absence and negative space.
Eisler’s viewpoint takes in the major geological changes and movements of the sea and earth, the fossils and the human histories and rites buried in the earth. She works with animal materials but also metals. It is not surprising to learn that her family were metallurgists in the Black Forest Mountains of Germany. Her viewpoint also tries to make sense of what we do with the relics, remnants and vestiges of what we find. How we display these clues is as much a clue as the clues themselves.
