Artereal Gallery: GARY SMITH AND DENISE HIGGINS // THE BARBED MAZE

The Barbed Maze, 2015, mixed media installation; dimensions variable. Photograph by Rob Little RLDI

Gary Smith and Denise Higgins are currently exhibiting their immersive installation, The Barbed Maze at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. David Broker, Director of Canberra Contemporary Art Space writes about this incredible installation piece below...

While Denise Higgins and Gary Smith have established personal practices in installation and painting they occasionally work in collaboration producing massive projects that are technically and conceptually ambitious in the extreme. The barbed maze is a site-specific installation that consists of panels of barbed wire suspended in a gallery of mirrors. 140 square meters of gallery is transformed into a “maze-scape” that is perceptually 4,000 square meters. The maze is a mixed metaphor that explores the darker labyrinthine recesses of the human mind and opens a puzzling path in which the individual might reckon with belief systems, conscience and alternative ideas. Along with many Australians Higgins and Smith have witnessed year after year of heated debate in which notions of national identity are periodically derailed by outbursts of racism, sexism and homophobia. A period of divisive government obsessed with stopping refugee boats, death cults, carbon taxes and challenged by family violence has left the country somewhat bruised. Together, however, these factors create a rich conceptual backdrop against which the barbed maze can operate.

Via infinite reflections through wall-to-wall mirrors Higgins and Smith create a space in which their audience is herded through spikey corridors and paradoxically trapped by its lack of borders, boundaries, or landmarks. In the chambers scattered throughout the maze, audiences are confronted with glimpses of confinement, surveillance and interrogation through the use of sound, video, , tableaux and objects. Higgins notes that this show focuses on the idea of audience being participants in the overall project where entering into the space of the maze they embark on a personal journey. Reflected in a “hall of mirrors” and framed by the barbed wire, they are confronted with a 360° view of the self and it’s sinister shadow, the generator of self-criticism and loathing, that might then be projected onto others.

It is expected that visitors immersed in this installation have a visceral experience of a carceral landscape that amplifies their sense of displacement. It is not the artists’ intent to be overtly political, threatening or to construct a sense of terror, but rather to transform the gallery into an alien environment where audience might experience a state of not being entirely in control. At each turn or cul-de- sac they must make decisions that will impact upon their next move or encounter, where both wit and luck determine the end game. Higgins and Smith liken the experience of their barbed maze to a modern day pilgrimage. The traveller navigates an unfamiliar environment with dead-ends and distractions, where the journey continually causes the traveller to reconsider a path to freedom that is complicated by complex social and environmental factors. The exhibition can also be seen as an exploration of carceral environments and how such places influence the balances of power in human behaviour and relationships.

In order to explore the mindset of “jailer and jailed” or “staff and inmates” Higgins and Smith bring together two potent symbolic forces; barbed wire and the maze. While barbed wire might be among the most familiar of everyday materials, it’s been an effective means of control for unmanageable creatures since the 1940s and in art it is loaded with resonances of brutality. The faces of Jewish prisoners through barbed wire fences in Germany’s WWII concentration camps and more recently Bosnian men in Serbia have left indelible stains on the very notion of humanity. Be it on outback farms, prison walls or Manus island barbed wire also has significant relevance to modern Australia.

In history the maze is a puzzle, to test the visitor’s orientation in a space where markers are removed and replaced by a complex series of confusing pathways. Seemingly innocuous in its sense of play the maze also has a sinister side that has made it a popular thematic in the horror, thriller, suspense and sci-fi genres of popular culture. In the dystopian worlds of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Stanley Kubrick’s Shining (1980) and Wes Ball’s The Maze Runner (2014), the maze is featured as a site of dread that offers a way out, but there is always a price to pay. Interestingly the protagonists of maze melodrama are almost always outsiders on the run from some horror or other, be it the war, domestic violence or the Maze Runner’s “world in catastrophe”. The barbed maze places everyone who enters in this vicarious position with at least one significant difference: the individual is on an inward journey, to be confronted by the scariest creature of all, you.

- David Broker, (Director, Canberra Contemporary Art Space) 2015.

The Barbed Maze runs until the 21st of November at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.