VOGUELIVING.COM.AU 131this page: two east-facing sitting rooms, off the entry of the original
homestead; taxidermy by Rowland Ward and his modern counterpart,
Gary Pegg. opposite page: in the guest bedroom, housed in a wing added
in 2015, a four-poster oak bed with hot-pink sheer curtains; ‘Bourgie’
bedside lamp by KARTELL. Details, last pages.‹‹ finest works (spanning a 35-year career) to the National Gallery of
Australia in 2014. Or maybe it’s the measure of a minimum 12-hour
working day drowning in it, but with typically abject Frankness the
artist asks, “Why would I?”
At the north end of this persimmon-flushed room, set-dressed with
taxidermy penguins and basalt black Wedgewood urns, sits a crazed
30-centimetre-high eggshell. Frank identifies it as the egg of the
extinct African elephant bird, a flightless creature that was hunted
into extinction in the 17th century. This translucent ovum, said to be
one of only 25 eggs remaining in existence, tells of the lengths and
expense Frank goes to in search of the rarest exemplars of natural
selection. They appear at odds with his avant-gardism.
Or do they? Perhaps it’s all just one big exposé on the struggle for
existence — a qualitative display of the universal search for being that
is now abstracting into big bang theories. Frank screws up his face at
the need to ‘nail’ him, but affirms his genuine interest in science and
cinema, particularly when the disciplines converge in such sci-fi epics
as Interstellar, the 2014 feature that idealises Einsteinian theory to
spectacular effect. “I know all the detail, all the science of it,” he says,
admitting to having watched the movie 27 times. “I replayed it over
and over on a flight from London to Sydney — the music, the motion
of the plane, you become one.”
Having already dived into the deep end of Australian colonial
furniture, Frank fully trains his obsession on taxidermy, the art and
specimen pursuit of which peaks in an 18-metre-long family room
(added in 2015) that fluoresces in a candy-floss pink. It’s not a colour
traditionally associated with taxonomies (more hysterical than
historical), but it renders the apex predators that feature in this frozen
zoo soft and fuzzy. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: does
Frank feel comfortable cohabiting with creatures hunted for the kill?
“Australia is the only country in the world where, if an animal dies
in a zoo, it cannot be taxidermied,” he says, dismissing any implication
of unethical procurement or promotion of the hunt. “This attests to
what has been lost — that Javan tiger was hunted into extinction,
probably because it ate all the little local Javanese children. The
paperwork is done and it is all government approved.”
Collecting the work of the late-19th-century British master
taxidermist Rowland Ward and commissioning Australia’s only
internationally awarded practitioner, Gary Pegg, to apply his ‘dying’
art to the deceased discard of international zoos, Frank suggestively
frames Homo sapiens as the noble savage; a genus so infatuated with
its own self-importance that it is serially doomed to suffer it. The artist
nuances this narcissism in his nearby studio, where massive Perspex
mirrors are fissuring under his chemical pour. These pieces present
the objectifying gaze as the source of infinitely variable subject and
frame time as fluid. Are they piss-takes on ‘pious’ patronage and the
need to reflect in big art, or genius reflections on the “mindlessness”
of social media? Frankly, my dear, Dale doesn’t give a damn. He’s just
using gravity’s effects to create wormholes that go way beyond the
archaeologies of abstraction. From interstellar to historic interior, Frank
theorises on deep space from his own astronomical dimension. VLDale Frank’s new exhibition at Pearl Lam Gallery in Hong Kong runs 19 January–19 March,
2017; pearllam.com. Visit roslynoxley9.com.au and neonparc.com.au.