The collaborative exhibition “A redistribution” by Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson combined the artists’ distinct practices with aplomb. Patterson often makes art out of unorthodox materials and processes, including obsolete or discarded products, while Cumming frequently engages with legacies of the readymade and institutional critique. Here, jointly and individually authored works came into dialogue with the show’s readymade centerpiece: a pair of millstones from the early years of settler colonization in Sydney.
The artists borrowed these rusticated circular lumps of hand-carved basalt (maker unknown) from Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Spaced apart on metal pallets, they dominated the gallery’s central floor space. The artists’ voluminous commentary on the gallery website suggests that these museum artifacts had likely been used to mark a moment in a linear narrative of technological progress or colonialist expansion. Reframed in the show, they ciphered, among other things, the invasion and expropriation of Indigenous lands, as well as the extraction and exhaustion of the earth’s resources. Initially, I wondered whether the exhibition’s elaborate didactic components made the displayed works somewhat beside the point. I found, however, that most rewarded attention to the many ways of thinking about redistribution that were opened up by their formal and material qualities.
The jointly authored Redistribution (forbearing/forthcoming), 2021, appeared on a wall behind the millstones. This edition of sixteen cream-colored, blind-debossed prints was made by repurposing one of the stones as a basic printing press. The weight of the runner stone had pressed the words DEEP HEAT, the logo of a popular muscle-pain treatment, into a stack of recycled paper handmade by Patterson. Arranged in two rows of eight, the prints registered the declining impress of the stone, evolving from legible to invisible. The words DEEP HEAT alluded to the liquid origins of basalt as molten lava solidified into a hard dense stone. Positioned on the floor nearby, Patterson’s sculpture Deep Heat, 2020, likewise amplified basalt’s igneous nature. In this instance, the artist carved a resting human arm out of remaindered basalt segments from a construction site; he had glued these together to form noticeable layers, like geological samples of the earth’s crust, and had sanded the arm to a smooth finish, except for a ragged-edged shoulder. A palm open to the ground seemed an image of exhaustion. In Patterson’s mural Seven Sleepers, 2023, seven multicolored rectangular shapes that were repeated at varying angles across the wall referenced reclaimed railroad ties the artist has used in previous works, while their faint layered plumes of color applied with an ink and water-vapor diffuser concocted by Patterson registered as passively self-effacing.
One of Cumming’s contributions, Spelt Flour, 2023, was literally a spelling exercise involving words for basalt and the product the millstones once discharged. The word BAFALTES had been painted in gray acrylic on a gallery wall, then sanded back to a ghostly trace. Online commentary identified the word as mistranslated Latin for what became “basalt” in English. Below the wall text stood a vitrine holding the word FLOWER (an earlier English spelling of flour), formed from the fine flour-like residue of the sanding process. This elegant installation cast words as mobile, malleable things, at once material and evanescent. Elsewhere Cumming enacted an institutional critique gesture with Double Zero, 2022. Using dough made from finely ground 00 flour and liquid from a Sydney stormwater channel near where the millstones once operated, he patched a few remnant holes in a gallery wall. A written record of this intervention was essential, since the repair was invisible to the naked eye. It was just as invisible as the labor of refinishing the gallery walls for the next exhibition round.
