Rodney Glick
Lap Pool
2004
Stitched tarpaulin
300 x 2572 cm
Edition of 3
photo: Robert Frith
Stretching down the middle of a suburban street is a stitched tarpaulin work, the surreal 25-metre Lap Pool. The work is to scale, 1:1, a flat, hard-edged minimal painting emulating a vertiginous bird's eye view, as if seen from a high diving board. It invests the painterly history of flatness and the shaped canvas with everyday familiarity and spatial play. The mental shifts and shocks that accompany the reception of this work, the sense that things are not what they first appear, or more (or less) than they seem to be, drives not only the manipulation of scale, but also the selection of materials. The use of tarpaulin links Glick's amusing construction firmly to the suburban backyard, with this versatile, tough, durable material also shown to have considerable allusive properties. Its this admixture of ordinariness, seduction, familiarity, oddness, suggestion and depiction that provides this work with its particular charge, elements pulled apart and reassembled to let their singular properties breathe and form new connections. Glick's visual shorthand is unexpectedly poetic, his workmanlike materials precisely and immaculately employed to spark the imagination, while indicating the limits at which we might suspend disbelief.
Adapted extract from the essay -
Glick's Game by Russell Storer published in the catalogue
Ambitious? Who, Me? Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004.