2010 New Skin Old Ceremony - Sculptural Works
Doll, Tanned and Cured Salmon Skin, Varnish
FRIDAY, 26 NOVEMBER - FRIDAY 10 DECEMBER
SPIRO | GRACE ART ROOMS 255 GREGORY TCE SPRING HILL Q 4000 www.sgar.com.au 0411 484 222
New Skin/ Old Ceremony draws together a new series of sculptures and a selection of works from two photographic series, Night Vision and New Skin. In these works Eisler plays with the notion of death and reanimation in a life affirming ceremony. The sculptures literally bristle with new skins of sea shells, metal, fish skins and other natural materials. No longer prized trophies, encrusted animal skulls, with the lingering sense of a past life, transform into an armoured and bejewelled squadron at the ready. The skins of salmon are formed into head gear and masks, accoutrements for a kind of shape shifting and anamorphism. The works are both beautiful and dangerous, doll like and embalmed.
The photographic works perform the sculptures, playing with ritual and the clichés of pose and display as the body merges with the darkness and the totemic and masquerading objects. The Night Vision images come from a powerful series that explores a primal and sexual thread that links humans to animals and develops the possibility of a new kind of exoskeleton for a more highly sensitised being. The New Skins works are located in the shallow space of fashion and iconography mixing a classicism of form with a doll like effigiation. These are troubling images, images that undermine the drive towards anthropomorphism and speak of reconnection with the animal, and a pantheistic reverence for nature but also our fears of the unknown and of a future world.
