Anna Kristensen’s Indian Chamber is currently on display in Bellowing Echoes, an exhibition curated by Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris at Gertrude Contemporary for Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.
CLICK HERE to read more about the exhibition.
Bellowing Echoes continues at Gertrude Contemporary 200 Gertrude Street Fitzroy, Victoria until 26 May 2012.
Anna Kristensen’s Indian Chamber is reviewed by Lisa Lerkenfeldt in the current issue of runway magazine (issue 20, Magic)
“As an indeterminate site, a temporary installation thematically linked to enigmatic phenomena, Indian Chamber was present on no absolute terms. It courted something beyond painting, beyond vision, beyond reality – something that escapes definition. Without limiting the means or destination, Kristensen acts as agent to set up key variables, through which we can choose to travel”
Indian Chamber, the panoramic painting installation is currently on view at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 24 November 2011 – 15 January 2012
Anna Kristensen’s major installation – a 360 degree panoramic painting of the Jenolan Caves’ Indian Chamber first exhibited at Gallery 9 in March 2011 is in the finalist exhibition of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship at Artspace, Sydney.
The Indian Chamber is an immersive work measuring 11 metres in circumference, 3.6 metres in diameter and 2.6 metres in height. Painted on the inside of a series of panels which form an enclosed circle, viewers access the work via a hinged door.
Recalling the Panorama entertainments of the 1800s, this extraordinary work explores the magical ability of painting to transport audiences from the physical limits of architectural space into an imagined world. A kind of natural room, the cave is both inside and outside. As the subject of this work it provides an inversion on 19th century panoramic wallpaper that wrapped natural vistas around domestic interiors, as well as being a reflexive pointer to the origins of painting itself. Adorned with crystal shawls, glistening flowstone, stalagmites, stalactites and a crystal basin floor, the Indian Chamber conjures the beauty of an Indian Palace yet it also functions as a backdrop for potential settings and senarios in the mind of the audience.
Anna Kristensen’s work features on the cover of the Spring issue of Ampersand Magazine. Combining art, culture and poetry, this little magazine-cum-journal is published by Art & Australia and well worth a read.