QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 12 March - 30 May 2004 Despite claims to the contrary, painting is not dead. What it actually is is another question. Curated by Suzanne Davis and Darren Wardle, the seventeen artists included in Glacier coolly reflect on and utilse the shifting and blurred boundaries of current painting practice that, like the glacier, moves inexorably from one state to another, subsuming and incorporating the things that it finds in its path. Chris Bond's Glacier with amendments could be taken as an allegory of the show's premise. A small painting of a glacier is set into a deep black frame in reverse; on one side of the frame we see a circular hook with a twisted picture wire (also painted black). The wire starts across the image, but upon encountering the glacier starts to twist down, separating into two stands that follow the outline of the glacier until they end, embedded in the frame. At some point the wire stops being picture wire and becomes part of the image, absorbed into the glacier's slow downward flow. In reality these changes are so incremental that they are difficult to pinpoint, or sometimes even identify. Trying to chase them down gives a feeling of something still missing, of having traveled in a circle, returning to where you started, deflected from the centre. In Dimmer, by Craig Easton, it is these incremental changes that erode some of the old modernist certainties in regard to painting. Dimmer comprises a large canvas created from four separate panels. Different types of paint are used to demarcate geometrical areas across the canvases. Enamel shines and shows faint reflections and shadows, contrasting with flat acrylic areas, the velvet depth of oil paint, and the primed white canvas. A thin red line (a zip?) transverses two of the panels, but doesn't make it to the edge. Each medium exhibits the flatness and purity championed by Greenberg and other modernists, yet by using different media in the one piece the work challenges the modernist view in its own terms and without ever leaving the realm of painting. Bloom, by Helga Groves, is a work that is as visually intriguing as a colour field painting or a sensual monochrome, but one that uses woven fishing line and a light box instead of paint. The folds or warping of the fabric create subtle shifts of colour. It is the edges, where the loops turn and the 'end' filaments rest just outside the 'frame' of the light box that draw the viewer into contemplation. If some of the work in Glacier can be read as an unraveling of categories of painting practice, Bloom somehow weaves these disparate categories back together into a unified object that is at once both distant from and involved in painting. The other two works by Groves, Black Ice and Shifting Across, both allude to slow movement. Black Ice is comprised of three panels of aluminum mesh with black ice crystals or snowflakes painted on the mesh. Several layers of mesh are arranged with the crystals not quite lining up. The layers blur, creating a feeling of both motion and depth. Shifting Across gives a strong feeling that the paint itself is moveable, in the manner of sliding doors, or screens. We must peer through these screens of pattern for the work to take shape. Mesh, weave and pattern are all related to the notion of structure, which is a recurring motif in Glacier. Black Ice not only showed a structure (the ice crystal) but in the mesh its own support structure is also visible. Other artists such as Nuha Saad, Clare Firth-Smith and Mark Galea suggest structure through the architectural motifs in their works, be it Saad's glossy enamel finals stacked on a shelf (Jubilant), Galea's reconfigurable acrylic panel sculpture (New and improved, structurally enhanced, revised millennium edition, do-it-yourself title) or Firth-Smith's building paintings (two can play this game, everybody's free (to be happy), and we slip & slide as we fall in love & I just can't seem to get enough of you). Of course architecture now refers not only to building, but to computer structures as well. Something interesting happens when we venture into the cyber world. In Stephen Halley's series Echohouse - Mirror Marx, Blue Glass and new E-state we see the same building first computer rendered in different materials, blue glass and paper with text respectively, but the third is a painting of this same house in a clichéd green and black circuit board effect. There is a qualitative difference between the two computer images and the painted one. A similar effect arises from David Harley's Misadventure. It is a structure in itself, a little sculpture that exists floating somewhere inside a computer, not an abstraction. Misadventure has a definite painterly effect, but the 'sign' of the shadow somehow allows it to be rendered sculptural at the same time. The reverse effect can also be used - things can be equalised by painting. Wang Zhiyuan levels out difference in objects by the use of colour in his Underpants Series, whereas in Range Life, Darrren Wardle takes an image of suburbia, applies computer effects over it, then paints it onto square canvases as two enlarged mirror images. The bright colours and subject matter are reminiscent of Howard Arkley, but in Wardle's case it is the image itself that creates patterns. Flat and decorative with all meaning leeched out, the image is rendered almost unrecognisable by its alterations. Even more unreadable is Icon, by Irene Wellm. The red areas look as if they are moving towards us, but it is difficult to tell what they are because of the blur - is it something organic, or a set of LED lights? Is it extremely close, or far away - like a galaxy? On closer inspection the red parts seem to be softly pointed, like lead pencils or the inside of one of Eva Hesse's boxes. Or perhaps it is pure abstraction. The title Icon, could refer to computing, or, in its original meaning, to the image itself. We are left wondering how to read the work. This question arises again when looking at Juan Ford's DW Phase 2. There are two panels; the second, smaller, panel shows a human skull in profile, painted as a computer rendered wire frame. The main panel shows a hyper-real male figure screaming, with a mathematical construct called a Klein bottle suspended in the air in front of him. Klein bottles come from the field of topology, whose main objective is the classification of surfaces, however, this one is etched into the actual support of the paining, etched into the aluminum sheet. It is the skull in the second panel that gives the hint that this construct is to be read as an anamorphosis, similar to the skull in Holbein's Ambassadors. The perplexing part is that you can't read a Klein bottle. Even if you stand where the figure is in the painting, the shape revealed isn't a Klein bottle as such, as the Klein bottle is a construct that is both inside and outside at the same time, a thing that has no boundaries and yet contains itself. These qualities can only be realised in four-dimensional space. It's not surprising the figure is screaming. It might be more fruitful to think of this anamorphosis as Slavoj Žižek does, as the existing knowledge that contaminates our subjective gaze, or as a point of view. In viewing Glacier the anamorphosis brought to bear on all the work is that of painting itself.