Helplessly Hoping

A Star-Like Quality Emma Nixon Illuminating the sympatico of their studio methodologies, Michael Sandford and Yusi Zang’s exhibition Helplessly Hoping, explores how these artists respectively fight to capture a moment of the elusive sublime in their drawings and paintings. Sandford invited Zang to exhibit together with him because he recognized a sincerity in her paintings that he grapples with in his own multi-disciplinary practice. He describes this synergy as a shared (though separate) endeavour to communicate to audiences a profound romance or beauty in the everyday. Both artists are beguiled by this potentially futile task, agreeing failure as a mechanism is part of their process. In a sea of misunderstanding or missed communication, a single moment of forged connection validates the effort. Sandford says, “It only needs to work once”. The chasing of this thrill is almost the very point of their individual pursuits. In Helplessly Hoping Sandford’s two chalk drawings on large found blackboards both source imagery from hacked public space security cameras – which Sandford watches and screenshots. Sandford has taken images from these illegally hosted streams from around the world many times before. He is captivated by their sense of chance and randomness, but also the slippages between something hidden and yet public. The first drawing Tokyo simply displays the brightly glowing numbers 6.85 in digital font, referencing an unknown countdown, or stopwatch denoting time by the millisecond. But this intimately rendered image requires a slow form of looking. Dense swells of purple provide a flecked and detailed background to the spectrum of colour which surrounds the illuminated numbers, reminding us how even darkness holds colour and form within it. Tokyo reverberates throughout the gallery space, your ears hear the ring of the alarm, your eyes see the speed at which the digits flash up or down. The second chalk drawing, Mountain Panoramic Wellness Hotel Dolasilla, bears an image sourced from a security camera at an Italian ski-resort. The grainy birds-eye view shows a large building surrounded by snow-laden grounds and tall spiky fences. Two old-fashioned street lights shine through the dawn or dusk. The site is devoid of people, marking a quiet kind of witching hour after the day finishes and before the next one has begun. The intricate imagery is rendered in almost ten different chalk colours, mirroring the buzzing pixelated colours of the digital screenshot. Using pointillism as a technique, the colourful smudges are entirely abstract when looked at closely, but from afar the pure disparate colours are blended by the viewer’s eye to create an accumulative dance alive with movement and light. In choosing not to use fixative spray on his drawings, he instead preferences the impermanence and fragility of chalk as a medium. Sandford spent hours laboriously crafting this anonymous image, transforming the voyeurs view through the artist’s earnest hand, making it his own. While Sandford’s drawing zooms out, an outsider’s overhead perspective, Zang’s painting Attack zooms in. The work depicts a dented car boot, which she once walked past and photographed, the car’s red rear light staring at you like an eye. Zang’s works are often so cropped that they do not reveal their origins, instead only offering shapes and shadows in muted hues as hints to her subject matter. She sees past the mundane, or personal connection to what she is painting, and deliberately obfuscates its origins. My first question for Zang when looking at her paintings is always “But what is it really?” Zang’s two other paintings depict canvases waiting for either activation or demise. The smaller painting of the two, Off-cuts reveals a pile of leftover canvas pieces, rendered useless and ready to be thrown away, their fold marks confirming their fate. Painted here in a creamy light blue palette, the depicted canvases have an uncanny physicality: their edges seem to bristle and you can almost feel the fabric beginning to fray. Her larger painting Folds shows us an unfolded piece of canvas, the crease marks still visible. The image is split down the middle, half brown and half blue, a central shadow delineating hue. The composition is almost abstract, yet Zang’s use of shading allows the canvases’ wrinkles to shine, restoring our sense of it as an object. In Offcuts and Folds Zang honours her unused materials by immortalising them in paint, perhaps to thank them for their service. Zang paints from photographs but removes the context for her viewers, obscuring her subject through tools of blending, colouring, lighting and her tightly formed frame. She explains to me how for her, a big part of painting is the disappointment of not being able to achieve the ideal image and learning how to work within her limits. She says “I think it was Kant who pointed out that the sublime is a negative experience of limits.” But the ambiguity of the subject in her paintings evokes an alluring familiarity, which audiences are drawn to but can’t always put their finger on. Both artists in Helplessly Hoping grapple here with acts of surveillance. For Sandford that happens on a world-wide scale through the screen of his computer. For Zang it is a self-surveillance of the objects and scenarios she sees and lives with. The paradigm shift for both artists occurs in the act of translation through which the photographic source becomes art. The result is often sensory and moves towards the sublime. This exhibition is a moment of alignment, when the poetic stirrings which Sandford and Zang channel into their artworks, connect before us. They offer us this encounter with a certain glistening in their eyes, as if they know something we don’t. Michael Sandford (*1998, AU) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. His practice exploits the permeability of contemporary boundaries between virtual and physical realms in order to construct and explore new forms of public space. Selected recent exhibitions include In the Night Time Bloom, Holden Garage, Berlin, 2023; In Time, On Time, Out of Time, PS Art Space, Fremantle, 2023; and Here’s your sign. Yes, I love you, TCB Art inc, Melbourne, 2022. Yusi Zang (*1991, CN) is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Melbourne, working primarily with painting and sculpture. Her practice strives for a level of realism that either mimics or extracts from the reality inherent in the everyday objects. Using an approach that breathes new life into frequently overlooked or dismissed objects, at times abject in their invisibility. Zang’s practice reconciles concepts of boredom and the sublime. Her paintings have a self-aware slacker trompe l'oeil style, and sculptures transcend the banalities of existence through humorous invention. Yusi Zang is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne.