CELESTE CHANDLER’S EXHIBITION REVIEWED IN ‘THE AGE’ BY ROBERT NELSON

Shape shifting
At Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Celeste Chandler also makes me think of riotous rituals of shape shifting, albeit in the demure language of realist painting. Her Ladies’ night shows the artist with male masks over her face or false limbs in front of her body; and a suite of photographs shows the artist with further foamy props, smothered in shaving cream, at times looking like some Greek philosopher from antiquity.

These works have the same balance of solemnity and farce, candour and masquerade, bravura and banality that one sees in fibre, painting and video media in Mexico City, a place where we can happily learn better how to dwell poetically.