For over 20 years, Gertrude Contemporary has presented an annual program, giving an opportunity for emerging curators to hone and exhibit their skills under the gallery’s guidance. This year’s winner is Annabel Brown, and The Limits of My Language Are the Limits of My World is the resulting exhibition now showing at Gertrude Glasshouse.
Exhibitions based on concepts currently being explored in academic circles are relatively rare, but not unheard of. For instance, Melbourne’s Project8 Gallery hosts shows in conjunction with Melbourne University – such as the 2022 exhibition Music as Image, which featured extreme metal vocalist Karina Utomo.
In a similar vein, Brown’s exhibition aims to explore “how a visual language can deepen our understanding of the distress caused by the climate emergency”.
The show’s title The Limits of my Language are the Limits of my World is presumably connected to the theory of linguistic relativity, which this reviewer personally finds fascinating. The power of words on worldviews has been discussed by many authors, for instance Nicholas D Evans, Don Watson and of course George Orwell. But saying we should develop a visual language to express currently inexpressible feelings forgets the fact that visual languages predate ones that involve symbols, phonics and syntax by at least tens of thousands of years.
The exhibition is a single room, with two dominating central pieces, Stephanie Wilson’s airport lounge waiting area seats and Steven Bellosguardo’s spectacular stand-alone sculpture of silicone and flowing rods of steel. The seats dominate the atmosphere of the entire room, turning it into a highly-decorated waiting area. Chloe Nolan’s caravan awnings are simple but effective.
Each piece is, theoretically, somehow a visualisation of the invented vocabulary of Glenn Albrecht, an Australian ‘environmental philosopher’. Albrecht has coined a new vocabulary of ‘psychoterratic’ terms, or psychological reactions to climate/environmental change. This may be laudable but, after some research on him, Albrecht sounds somewhat like L Ron Hubbard, similarly creating a cult of devotees, including coining a new geological epoch post-Anthropocene, with a website declaring how life will be lived once it arrives. Therefore this aspect of the show is problematic – Albrecht’s nomenclature, especially with the melodramatic tone of the exhibition guide, gives viewers of the show a distinct feel of being preached to.
Ultimately, using Albrecht’s pseudoscience (peer-reviewed pseudoscience, but pseudoscience nonetheless) as a framework for a legitimate comment on allegedly universally-felt emotions (“existential dilemmas related to ecological catastrophe”) is problematic. One reason is that countless millions of people (especially in the Western world), are blissfully unaffected by, busily distracted from, or adamantly in denial of the effects of climate change, and therefore feel none of the “existential dilemmas” that Brown assumes are felt by everyone.
Introducing this exhibition in such emotionally-weighted blanket terms is like someone saying, “you know that feeling when you find a giraffe in your bed?”, expecting you to be perfectly familiar with the feelings that arise from discovering a 2000-kilogram, long-necked ungulate under your doona. Personally, this reviewer does feel the environmental emotions Brown and Albrecht are attempting to verbalise (to whatever degree of success), but millions of people clearly don’t.
Read: Exhibition Review: Tarik Ahlip: Kara Toprak, Schmick Contemporary
With these points in mind, Brown’s exhibition is still bold, daring and intelligent, but perhaps too much so for its own good. Perhaps go to the curator talk on Saturday 30 November to get an insight into the show directly from the curator herself.
The Limits of My Language Are the Limits of My World
Gertrude Glasshouse, Gertrude Studios
The Limits of My Language Are the Limits of My World will be exhibited until 14 December 2024.
Curator talk with Annabel Brown Saturday 30 November, 3-4pm. The exhibition webpage includes a 3500 word curatorial essay and documentation.
