Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson’s collaborative exhibition “A redistribution” confidently combined the artists’ distinct practices. Patterson often creates art from unorthodox materials and processes, including obsolete or discarded products, while Cumming is frequently interested in the legacies of ready-made and institutional criticism. Here, works by joint and individual authors entered into dialogue with the show’s ready-made centerpiece: a pair of millstones from the early years of settlement in Sydney.
The artists borrowed these rusticated circular pieces of hand-carved basalt (maker unknown) from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney. Spread out on metal pallets, they dominated the central space of the gallery. The artists’ voluminous commentary on the gallery’s website suggests that these museum artifacts had likely been used to mark a moment in a linear narrative of technological progress or colonialist expansion. Reframed in the show, they quantified, among other things, the invasion and expropriation of indigenous lands, as well as the extraction and depletion of the earth’s resources. Initially, I wondered if the elaborate didactic components of the exhibition made the exhibited works somewhat irrelevant. I found, however, that the most rewarding attention was the many ways of thinking about redistribution that were opened up by their formal and material qualities.
The co-author Redistribution (abstention/coming soon), 2021, appears on a wall behind the millstones. This edition of sixteen debossed cream colored prints was made by reusing one of the stones as a basic printing press. The weight of the runner’s stone had pressed the words DEEP HEAT, the logo for a popular muscle pain treatment, into a pile of recycled paper handmade by Patterson. Arranged in two rows of eight, the engravings record the declining imprint of the stone, evolving from readable to invisible. The words DEEP HEAT alluded to the liquid origins of basalt as molten lava solidified into a hard, dense stone. Positioned on the ground nearby, Patterson’s sculpture deep heat, 2020, also amplified the igneous nature of basalt. In this case, the artist sculpted a resting human arm from leftover basalt segments from a construction site; he had glued them together to form visible layers, like geological samples of the earth’s crust, and sanded the arm to a smooth finish, except for one shoulder with jagged edges. An open palm on the ground seemed an image of exhaustion. In Patterson’s fresco Seven Sleepers2023, seven multicolored rectangular shapes that were repeated at varying angles on the wall referenced salvaged railway sleepers the artist has used in previous works, while their faint plumes of layered color applied with a ink and water vapor diffuser concocted by Patterson recorded as passively erased.
One of Cumming’s contributions, Spelt flour, 2023, was literally a spelling exercise involving words for basalt and the product the millstones had once unloaded. The word BAFALTES had been painted in gray acrylic on a gallery wall, then sanded down into a ghostly streak. An online comment identified the word as a mistranslated Latin for what became “basalt” in English. Beneath the text on the wall was a display case containing the word FLOWER (an old English spelling of flour), formed from the fine mealy residue of the sanding process. This elegant installation projects words as mobile, malleable things, both material and evanescent. Elsewhere, Cumming adopted a gesture of institutional criticism with double zero, 2022. Using paste made from finely ground 00 flour and liquid from a Sydney storm drain near where the millstones once operated, he patched up a few remaining holes in a wall of gallery. A written record of this intervention was essential, because the repair was invisible to the naked eye. It was just as invisible as the finishing work on the gallery walls for the next exhibition.
