SHARNA OSBORNE – ‘an intimate sense of threat’
Flummox of Equilibria – FAMILY TREE (c.2007)
Sharna Osborne is out there – definitely – NZ-born via
Australia to London and the world. Her tool the moving image for the moving
world. Yet the work showing at WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC is anchored, quite literally, by an umbilical cord(?) Something to do with where we come from – a
cabbage patch? And where we want to reach out to? What we want to wash away?
Who would have thought the wild cosmopolitan world of Osborne would find a
window on Beeac, Australia 3251.
Impossible is nothing as the Chinese say (especially about
the time of the 2008 Chinese Olympic Games).
Like Osborne Romanis defies pigeon-holing – his work
ranges across media and the landscape in what is now a very competitive ‘area’,
a commissioned life – public sculpture: concept design production installation.
He mashed sheep and blue – way before The Avatar ever thought Blue.
The provocative design, art direction and fashion styling
of Briton Judy Blame, way earlier, might also offer context for Osborne. Blame’s
early work, a generation ahead of hers, deep in the counterculture of the 70s, 'stirred the pot' and pulled together unlikely tangents to make a provocative object.
The artist is indeed a many splendid thing. Find more about Sharna Osborne's work at: http://sharnaosborne.com
Maybe a Greek might offer a ‘final word’: ‘In
the past two decades, as the world has become more polarized, there has been a
radical explosion in activist, dialogical, interventionist and tactical media
art practices in almost every corner of the world.’ (Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, [2012].
Osborne’s work, to this writer’s mind, seems to encapsulate what Papastergiadis
terms ‘an intimate sense of threat’.
Flummox of Equilibria – FAMILY TREE (c.2007) [still, on a screen, in a room]
