Craft Year in Review: Glistening treasures and guilty pleasures
This was a year of guilty pleasures, of virtuous objects and moments of community.
Itching to slip on a vintage Serpent bracelet-watch, we bathed in the iridescence of the precious gems in Italian Jewels. Bulgari Style at the National Gallery of Victoria (until January 29).
A positively pink view of the Marilyn Monroe exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery.Credit:Bill Conroy
Female clients from Hollywood and Cinecitta studios of the 1960s still flicker among the mirror screens of the installation, but their male counterparts – Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn or Richard Burton, say – might equally effectively have carried off the heavy-duty glamour of ornament more usefully weighed in kilos than carats.
While Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell sashayed pinkly through Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend (Marilyn Monroe, Bendigo Art Gallery), Melburnian Sally Marsland was questioning just how useful her attachment to non-precious stones, fossicked with family and by friends, could be in her work. (Many I Love Are Here, Gallery Funaki).
Movie stars and dazzling jewellery combine at Italian Jewels: Bulgari Style at NGV International.Credit:Wayne Taylor
We all experience sentimental attachment to stuff, whether industrially produced or handmade, and studio artists sometime overplay an emphasis on intimacy with their work. Marsland, however, displayed an exemplary restraint with highly considered pendants, brooches and rings.
When we are given the social history of even modest exhibits, as in My Learned Objects: Collections and Curiosities (Ian Potter Museum of Art, guest curator David Sequeira); Sister Corita's Summer of Love (Ian Potter Museum of Art, Parkville, until March 26) and On Air. 40 Years of 3RRR (State Library of Victoria, until January 29), our longing for community becomes a big part of the significance of the show.
In 2016, we kept ourselves nice with Toni Maticevski (in 200 Years of Australian Fashion at NGV Australia; and his Dark Wonderland at Bendigo Art Gallery until January 15). Just as polished gold bezels enhance Bulgari gemstones, Maticevski's rigid bodices and structured draping are designed for women looking for a place to shine.
While glamour has a dark side, it does not figure on a spectrum that includes the daily violence provoked by traditional clothing, such as the wearing of a headscarf, and that most grotesque sartorial statement from 2004: a hooded, blanket-wearing victim of US torture in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison.
Commodity Gown, 2015, part of Maticevski: Dark Wonderland at Bendigo Art Gallery.
Printmaker Neil Emmerson is alert to the gendered aspect of such brutalities, and recently demonstrated the dazzling juggling act that is his approach to image-making with an installation of multiple screen prints in which a news media image of a gay man thrown from a building was printed in transparent and opaque white ink on black card and on white paper already bearing a digital image of a costume of Emmerson's own making, based on the torture image.
Emmerson never asks less than everything a medium can offer in his ongoing critique of gender inequality. A kaleidoscopic arrangement of multiples of these images became patterning for a purpose (Semaphore, RMIT's Spare Room).
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