| Dates: | born 1953
| | Biography: | 1953 Born in Sydney.
Lives and works in Sydney
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1998 Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of
Western Australia, Perth
Loophole, Hamish McKay Gallery,
Wellington Grey Goods, Nancy Hoffman
Gallery, New York
1997 Susan Norrie, Experimental Art
Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia
1995 Shudder, Nancy Hoffman Gallery,
New York
Susan Norrie, Survey/Project Exhibition,
Museum of Modern Art at Heide,
Melbourne
1994 Susan Norrie, Survey/Project
Exhibition, The Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney
Error of Closure, Artspace, Sydney
1986 Susan Norrie/Paintings 1983-86,
University Gallery, University of
Melbourne, Melbourne
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1999 Signs of Life: Melbourne
International Biennale, Melbourne
1998 "All this and Heaven Too," Adelaide
Biennial of Contemporary Australian Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
The Infinite Space: Women, Minimalism
and the Sculptural Object, Ian Potter
Museum of Art, The University of
Melbourne, Melbourne
1997 The Engimatic Object:
Photography and the Uncanny, The Art
Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Archives and the Everyday, Canberra
Contemporary Art Space, Canberra
1996 Spirit and Place, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Sydney
1994 Virtual Reality, National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra
1992 Strangers in Paradise, National
Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul
Purloined Image, Flint Institute of Art,
Michigan
1987 Emerging Artists 1978-86:
Selections from the Exxon Series,
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New
York
1986 Origins + Originality + Beyond: 6th
Biennale of Sydney, Sydney | | | Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | | Date of source: | 1999 |
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| | Description: | Susan Norrie has consistently explored
states of mind through her use of
materials and space. In her first critically
acknowledged paintings in the late 1
970s she developed her earlier collaged
abstractions into deep relief
composi¬tions based on paraphernalia
from a woman's dressing table. These
images were intensely claustrophobic,
the familiar forms of powder puff or pearls
slipping all too easily into a queasy
semblance of flesh. In subsequent
paintings the material excesses of these
compositions gave way to a fascination
with memory, which became the
repressed presence in fantastic and
often grotesque images. These forms
served as metaphors for psychic states
in which consciousness begins to slide
out of control, dissolving the corporeal
boundary between a claustrophobic
interior and a monstrous exterior
landscape.
More recently, Norrie has used
installations to stimulate responses and
associations in the viewer. Her objects
animate their environments like
furnishings in a domestic environment,
yet defy the logic of such functional
objects. Black, shiny surfaces and
frames, or cabinets that can have no
access, transform these locations into
blank, mnemonic sites waiting to be
filled in with unacknowledged memories.
Norrie has recently been working with
films that are edited and slowed down to
intensify the visual and atmospheric
effects. The rooms in which the films are
shown function as installations.
The claustropho¬bic presence of the
image is an effect of its relative scale,
while the furnishings of the space further
enhance this impression. A powerful
theme linking all these works is the
generation of profoundly disturbing
psychic experiences. Norrie often
explores states such as epilepsy and
trance, triggering our own latent terror at
any slippage between consciousness
and the unconscious.
In Liverpool she is presenting a new film
installation in which there are two
images. One is projected and is large
enough to allow the viewer to experience
a bodily sense of compression in the
space. The other is shown on a smaller
screen set into the wall. The room is
painted glossy brown, again producing a
sense of claustrophobia while
emphasising the uniformity of the space.
The images - which combine archival
footage with fictional material - deal with
human tragedy and personal trauma.
The wall projection includes footage
taken from film and documentaries
dealing with Chernobyl and other nuclear
disasters.
The small monitor set into the wall
shows a slowed down sequence from
the scene in Woody Allen's Interiors
where the mother is taping gaps around
the windows before attempting suicide.
She is both sealing herself into her tomb
and desperately trying to keep out
whatever constitutes her greatest fear.
When the film is slowed down, the
sound of ripping tape becomes ugly and
threatening. As symmetrical images of
entrapment, both films link life and death
to the obsessive preservation and
rupturing of spatial boundaries.
| | Description Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | Description Source Date: | 1999 | | Gender: | female | | Type: | person |
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