GATHERING 


2005



 medium density fibreboard, epoxy surfacing, 

 35mm slide projectors, projected images


9 Panels 

individual panels  204 x 82 x 1 cm. 


Overall dimensions variable

please enlarge image for detail

Hazewinkel’s sculptural installation Gathering, 2005 was first presented in Cluster, his joint exhibition with Richard Gilblett at Conical, Melbourne. In her essay accompanying the exhibition Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow writes

‘In the work Gathering, 2005, Hazewinkel lays out a field of freestanding sculptural forms which function also as screens for the reception of their own image in space. Whilst their outer extreme is like the rounded-off edge of a door, the inner mass of each piece dissolves, adopting the sinuous silhouettes such as those of Brancusi, Arp or Matisse’s late papercuts. Each form is at once simple and complex, similar yet unique. By projecting the image of these sculptural forms back onto their own surface Hazewinkel creates a circular sense of reflection and ricochet. We become unable to distinguish between that which is materially before us and the frozen record of what we see projected back again…

...Hazewinkel’s Gathering offers a shadowy collection of figures which seem to have been captured slipping between states of solid form and entities of flesh - an assembly of shapeshifters. Sharing an identical external form, the internal dimension of each sculpture is unique. That which is cut away, defines the individual in this crowd of standing figures. It is in examining this interior dimension that we are closest to the artist’s hand and body, the expressive residue in the work, the line between absence and presence, exists in the trace of the jigsaw slicing through the mdf board. Hazewinkel draws with the jigsaw. The silhouette marked out by this line is of human scale; however what we see is not the reflection of an individual, but an abstraction.This sculptural line cuts in, curling sinuously, gathering bulbous form and mass as well as speed, travelling upwards, outwards and down again – all the time balancing negative and positive space – tracing an edge that will determine sculptural form.

These sheets of painted surface are animated by the dynamic qualities they share with the human form, the way in which they step forward, their scale and the puncture of their surface as if human movement has dissolved a passage through each ‘door’, whose scale, echoes memories of thresholds we have negotiated. Hazewinkel’s sculptural forms also have the quality of a crowd, standing, with one leg forward and one back, each element occupies space confidently, striding to claim volume. Like a crowd they can be read as both separate individuals and also as one entity, acting with joint agency. They do not wander but are purposeful; they bear toward us intently, but frozen in the activity of movement. They are as still as if they have been captured looking on the face of the Gorgon, they stride no more, like Lot’s wife transformed into a pillar of salt, they now bear witness, petrified in the perceptual passage of time.

Hazewinkel has transformed the gleaming white surface of these sculptural entities into screens. They bear the projected image of their own form in space so truthfully that solid surfaces appear to dissolve into the rendering of an edge in space. As screens, they glow softly, they are not so much solid as translucent, they act as conspirators in fragmentation of their own form. What we see is not the definitive articulation of form in space, but the elaboration of a conundrum – the search for truth and solidity - rather than a calming reassurance of known rules of mass and perspective.

In the manner of René Magritte, Hazewinkel punctures a solid rendering of reality, taking pieces from the jigsaw to reveal the deceit that is the surface. Pictorial space and constructed space merge, art renders illusion, and then turns back upon itself to make us aware that reality is purely a construction of our imagination, a matter of perception and perspective, just as Plato proposes our perception of the world as being like the experience of shadows on the wall of a cave, our construction of reality is based upon our reading of a set of clues before us.

Hazewinkel begins by constructing simple sculptural entities, of formal beauty. They stand and stride with inscrutable and slightly threatening agency. Their surfaces reveal multiple images of their own form in space, dissolving their solidity and establishing a space of hypothetical possibility. He establishes a circular ricochet or echo, each repeat taking us further from any confident assertion as to where we believe the truth may lie, or which form might be the original. Light and shadow conspire to camouflage any truth of surface. Each possible version of what is real or true lasts only as long as the clues we are given remain consistent, when clues point to multiple realities our capacity to make sense of the world breaks down.

In presenting us with layered versions of the same view Hazewinkel questions the workings of sight, memory, knowledge and experience. We experience a sense of déjà vu, and yet to stop and untangle what it is that we have already seen throws us into confusion. We must question not only the sequence of memory in time, but somehow the interior nature of memory within the grey-matter of our own physiognomy. What we see realised in space before us, becomes an extrapolation of the inner space within.’