Movement of Disappearance
May 2012
Painter and printmaker Caroline Rannersberger responds intuitively to her environment, opening up a new way of ‘seeing’ the landscape through acknowledging that rather than one fixed viewpoint, landscape contains multiple and shifting points of connection across time and space.
Working predominantly on paper or wood panels, Rannersberger’s large scale landscapes reference both her Tasmanian surrounds and her German heritage. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), and Artbank. She has been a finalist in the Glover prize, the Fleurieu Art Prize, the ABN Amro Award, Fremantle Print Award, & the Alice Prize.
In these new works by Caroline Rannersberger at Flinders Lane Gallery, she continues her engagement with the land and with vision. She has never offered ‘merely landscape’ in her artworks but rather a hallucinatory approximation of the world in images of discovery and recognition. In these works, as is her customary practice, she has worked from a direct encounter with the land out in the field and then reformulated that experience as a fiction in the studio.
At times these works have the appearance of glass slides removed from an enormous microscope; they twist and shift our sense of scale and play with our insecurities. Like words written on water they first disturb our own reflection before they distort and camouflage what lies submerged below. She reminds us, contrary to the cliché that you see the work and finish it, that in that act of seeing an artwork you are not completing but extending the fiction of its production.
She has always chosen to entangle the experience of her immersion into a specific location with that of the vision of a predecessor, a similar alien intruder, be they explorer, artist or mystic. In her earlier works from the north of Australia it was the handwritten accounts of Leichhardt and in these new works from the far south of Tasmania it is the presence of La Perouse and D’Entrecasteaux whose visions squeeze and distort our optic.
In all her works we observe the observer, we experience an encounter that seems impossible, that of seeing the sensation of seeing and its apparent dissolution. She attempts to capture that tremulous state, what Alain Badiou has called elsewhere “the movement of disappearance”, a disturbance not yet transformed into an object nor cast in negation as an absence, but rather the actuality of disappearance itself.
In this way through a rejection of the redundant descriptions offered by representational landscape, she is able to erect a complicated constructed layer of images fused at the edge of a cylindrical vision, where time, space and matter are wrapped back around upon themselves and are seen as though viewed through the boundary that surrounds them.
In this way we experience the land as always a double, an existence of something existing prior to the existence of human thought itself.
Caroline Rannersberger – Movement of Disappearance shows at Flinders Lane Gallery from May 8 to 26.
Image: Caroline Rannersberger, Towards Huon Island 2012, oil, pigment on paper , 120 x 120cm triptych.
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