Exhibition

Chinese Laundry

by Vikki McInnes, April 2007 

When I moved to Melbourne in 1995, Chinese Laundry was a club night run by Hardware every Friday at the Dome. At the time, the shuffling and the strobes highlighted the fact that the shift I had made from Wellington was far bigger symbolically than it was physically. Subtle differences (the dancing, again) become magnified when you feel exposed, and dislocation developed into - and remains - something of a theme in my after-hours life.

It's why I respond so strongly to the dream-sequence animations of James Lynch but it's also the reason I could manage only a half smile upon seeing the invitation to Chinese Laundry. The depiction of the artist in his studio, pants around his ankles, a tangle of coloured light globes at his feet with a sign taped to the wall reading 'please turn out the lights...' is too discomfiting, too disconcerting, too embarrassing. Not for Lynch. For me.

There has always been a highly vulnerable quality to Lynch's work though; a fragility not just in its subject matter (other people's earliest memories or their dreams featuring the artist, for example), but also in its construction (loose, even rudimentary, drawing or painting styles and humble installations). There's always been an ambiguity of meaning, too. Even the animations, which seem to employ a fairly straightforward narrative convention, don't really make sense. Action is rather more surreal than real. Across his practice, Lynch considers how truths might be constructed or realities are mediated - and these new paintings continue that interest.

Lynch has collected the vast array of images that surrounds him in his studio and on his computer including, among so many others, natural phenomena, car crash scenes, flag-waving activists and gun-toting teens. The images are cut or torn from their original contexts and propped against one another, creating a bewildering succession of tableaux which Lynch photographs and then paints. Located somewhere within each is the artist himself, in most cases barely discernibly; the corner of an eye or those ridiculous trouser-less legs. The works hover somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, and present a number of open-ended scenarios. Perhaps they've come out of conversations - the textures certainly seem to suggest verbal interactivity as much as visual - perhaps they represent actual events (eclipses, protests, accidents) or, just maybe, Lynch has composed the works entirely from within the realm of pure chance. Meaning is determinedly, frustratingly, delightfully slippery.

So it is in the sculptural elements of Chinese Laundry. Two motorised umbrellas spin quietly in one corner, their tempo and colour paradoxically imbuing the space with both ennui and drama. Three old, abandoned washing machines, collected from the side of the road, are transformed into bizarre magic lanterns once Lynch has taken his power drill to them and lighted them from within. Embellishing the tired surfaces with delicate designs, Lynch creates an immanent sense of regeneration. It's obvious, on the one hand; they're vessels for our dirty washing, after all. But the frailty of the moths hovering around the candle flame, the transience implied in the text 'Please turn out the light...' particularly recall the awkward, transforming times I was stepping when I should have been shuffling.

Vikki McInnes is the Director of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne