Texts relating to ‘The Cave Forgot to Glisten’
by Lili Ward, Victoria Loizides and Maggie Kontev
a group exhibition curated by Margarita Kontev in February 2022, featuring Stan Saniga, Luka Lesosky-Hay and Lottie van Wijck at Wethouse
The Cave Forgot to Glisten
Wethouse
329 Lt. Collins St. 3000
Floor 2 Room 6
Curator’s note: This show revists a once explored cavern at an unknown site, where lost echolocation signals perpetually reverberate off metallic walls and scattered art relics litter the slippery floor.
In this humid and dim hollow, earth’s classical elements are hand-crafted into sculptural works that depict the survival and decoration of the bygone cave.
The mockery of nature, just as water slowly eats away at limestone minerals and the liquid scum left behind by Melbourne’s CBD drains away into the sewer that travels beneath our feet; there isn’t a great difference between the troglodytes that once inhabited caves and who we think we are today.
A karst hollow greets us all, we unclench our fists and bite the Lt. Collins st curb.
Outside; a crumbling hive.
Inside; the air like shredded silk.
An argent blouse of smog is torn by the red finger of a stalagmite.
(Soupy)
A humid dew that curls my hair.
Relieved of my senses, I crawl.
Drenched, calescent, silent,
And then I feel the birth of language, with no one to talk to, I learn to speak.
“Irony with its plasmatic film”
I let my voice fill the cave, coating every inch, until I am quite sure it could crack. Then again, all at once
the words deflate,
Fall, left writhing in the dirt, in amongst the cathedrals of limestone, between
the Moon-milk covered limbs, this is my empire of dust.
***
I’m crawling still, pink knees and palms skinned by red gravel, weaving through rocky arms.
With every inch, introducing my hands to the tiny roads I am creating.
I sputter like an old engine, spitting up what my now raw skin swallows,
It travels through me,
forging paths and finding its exits, just as I am.
Scratching, scraping the cavity, crumbling the flowstones.
I’m pink, raw all over and I come to see that there is more to know here in this dim grotto, than outside the
buzzy hive,
So I’ll stay, tuck myself in with blankets of deadwood and dust.
Night!
Accompanying text by Lili Ward
https://oglingfromhome.blogspot.com/
Luka Lesosky-Hay, Lottie van Wijck and Stan Saniga
Exhibition review by Victoria Loizides
Latch the window and tighten it shut. Hide the speaker that plays an echo of trickling water sounds under a sheet. Face your back to the window that looks down to Collins Street, where the cave forgot to glisten detaches you from the metropolitan, to heed warning of a “once explored cavern at an unknown location.”
Margarita Kontev of WetHouse curates an exhibition of four separate inquiries into the elements that make up a cave. On the right side of the entrance lives Stan Saniga’s conglomeration of various found and forged metals (2022), heaped together at random or otherwise composed to frame the skirting board and protective art-bubble around it. Protection is suggested further in the symbolic facsimile of a watchdog who guards the bundle of precarious tools. Standing merely nine centimetres tall with pointed legs needled to the floor, the structure comes together to bear some resemblance of a sickle at its centre. Its abrasive nature in material and stature alone seems to exercise prudence over its rusty lookalikes, a cautionary nod that extends to the rest of the works re: Saniga’s wedged axe in the door across the room over fellow artist Luka Lesosky-Hay’s work. This sentiment seems fitting enough for a tool that dually symbolises danger and protection.
Lesosky-Hay’s fractured cessation (2022) is interwoven with similar principles. A two-fold work including a 3D rendered image is stationed just below the area defended by the fabled axe. To the bottom left of the window is a life-size ice block with a trail of red thread that is likened to frozen blood, and as the block melts, we can imagine the reddened fabric loosening from its icy grip. Over time, it will sink in the overflowing steel tray, limp and lifeless, as if being frozen in time was worthier. This full effect would take hours in reality, however, the temporal threat is relayed in the first glimpse. Within this, a lesson reveals itself. It is one that begins with the knowledge of what will happen as time persists. Whilst the ice block is endearing, it promises a spillage not unlike the threat that is imposed by larger scale ice sheets melting in Antarctica, set to worsen floods around the world. Burdened by the knowledge of our human endeavours leading to our demise, it is hard to not see our reflections in the poor little red thread. Luckily, Lesosky-Hay’s digitally rendered image offers some respite by continuing to exist unscathed by time.
This tale of caution reveals a premise for the cave forgot to glisten. At first, the inquiries are welcome celebrations of these reimagined earthly cavities. The materials found in a cave, like charred posts, rusted metals, ice, and “the birth of language” as Lilli Ward would say, are staged to replicate the experience. These elements allow a getaway from the city just below our feet, to enjoy this fantastical land of mystery, surrounded by now-art relics that hold knowledge preceding far beyond our time.
However, the environs vibrate at a different frequency altogether; that of the impending dangers in these once populated sites, that even a veneer of objective beauty and fantasy cannot mask. This sentiment rings true for most naturally occurring land features and their individual elements, and just like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, such sites are as cut-throat as they are mesmerising.
Lottie Van Wijick’s charred posts further conceptualises this tale by speaking of a past that devastated many; the 2009 Black Saturday Bushfires that recorded the highest-ever loss of human life. These works are propped up against a wall closest to the open window of WetHouse, allowing a healing breeze to lick the wounds over and over, until it shuts again. Still ripe from the fires, Tracing Tarrawarra (2021) builds on the dim and hollow energy that reverberates around the room. The stained and smudged wall behind the posts hold us responsible to our collective memory of the unimaginable loss and terror that many close to the fires of Yarra Valley still feel. This sculptural depiction is a telling aftermath, and evidently serves as a warning of what can and has become of our landscape.
There is respite in this small, selective cavern. Whilst these art relics heed warning of our environs, they dually speak of the elements that have allowed us to forge a path in this universe. So we turn inward, to look at the things and pieces and places that came before us and learn “there is more to know here in this dim grotto, than outside the buzzy hive.”
Enter at your own risk.
Written by Victoria Loizides