When Janenne Eaton exhibited a painting modeled on Gauguin’s Manao Tapapau, 1892, in the mid ’80s, it looked as if she was yet another painter recycling images under the loose pretext of a feminist revisioning of art history. In place of Gauguin’s Tahitian girl lying on a bed, Eaton substituted a bound and gagged woman, watched from suburban venetian blinds by “spirit figures” drawn from a newspaper photograph of a Russian solider in a gas mask. The memorable feature of this painting, which suggested an inversion of Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy, 1981, was neither its play with then-fashionable tropes

Even more startling than the scale of Takamasa Kuniyasu’s installation—one of the major works scattered across Melbourne as part of the Australian Sculpture Triennial—is the physical threat that it poses to his viewers. Comprised of 70,000 hand made ceramic bricks—the artist’s signature since 1984—and a skeletal armature of pine logs, Shape of the Earth, 1990, was disconcertingly and perhaps inadvertently situated on the anxious middle-ground between sculpture and installation. A superficial resemblance to creeping freeze-framed mountainsides emphasized the difference between its threatening