AWFULLY WONDERFUL

Science and art have always had a symbiotic relationship. It’s been said that Cezanne’s paintings pre-empted our modern knowledge of the way vision works, and that Virginia Woolf perfectly expressed the fractured and regenerative self of modern science. Awfully Wonderful, which opened as part of Performance Space’s Uneasy Futures program last week, explores this relationship, taking as its theme science fiction in contemporary art. Twelve Australian artists have produced as eclectic a range of responses as may be expected. The works ranges from 50s sci-fi kitsch to retro futurism to more sophisticated blends of real and fictional. Technologies made incomprehensible by age sit alongside carnivalesque ‘shrinking machines’, a fully-operational Mars Gravity Simulator is circled by a melancholy Metropolis robot. One of the most striking works, by Hayden Fowler, is a large-scale ‘living diorama’, which sees the artist inhabiting a strange post-apocalyptic landscape of boulders and grass, a rare human element in the show. For me, the best of sci-fi is encapsulated in a video work by collaborators Ms & Mr, in which they use old home movies to digitally insert each other into a collective past. Frame Drag, based on the concept of Time Dilation (theoretical human time travel), is eerily simple, yet infinitely complex. It’s a reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the bare, Lynchian aesthetic leaving the viewer to contemplate the nature of memory, time, and our position between these things. Awfully Wonderful is just that, a smorgasbord of sci-fi, technologies, pasts real and imagined, and futures that may never come to pass. Kids of all ages, your cosmic journey begins at Performance Space. Get in and restore your sense of wonder.

Until May 14, Performance Space, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh, free, performancespace.com.au