FUTURISM IN THE PUMPKIN PATCH

DANCE

6 Mar

Recently landed: Futurism in the Pumpkin Patch

Gracia’s written response to Melanie Lane’s Pulau (Island), and Lucy Guerin Inc’s I’m in a Forest, especially for Fjord Review.

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The boulevard of London plane trees has been wrapped in Yayoi Kusama’s white-on-pink dots, the only southern hemisphere biodiversity capable of flourishing in these particular northern hemisphere trees. Together with Julien Opie’s Australian Birds animated on 20 screens planted in the earth beneath, this futuristic and adorned natural world sets the tone for Melanie Lane’s Pulau (Island), commissioned especially for Asia TOPA and the National Gallery of Victoria’s Kusama exhibition.

Guided into the gallery by Kusama’s Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, threading past her replanting of Narcissus Garden (first presented in 1966 on the lawn in front of the Italian pavilion of the Venice biennale), it seems only fitting that for this after-hours viewing of Lane’s new, site-specific work that the audience should assemble around a Dancing Pumpkin. In the NGV International’s Federation Court, Kusama’s bronze pumpkin, some five-metres tall, looms large, or have I been made smaller as I passed through the Narcissus Garden of stainless steel spheres? Transformation and infinite possibilities being the name of the game, I feel the intended but one small part of the cosmos, as I find a place to wait, see, and sow.

The voluminous pumpkin hovers off the ground, eight tentacle-like limbs dancing in the air, summoning the dancers, Katherine Hegeman, Jareen Wee, Te Bajao, and Tyrel Dulvarie who descended from the nearby escalator. Wrapped tight in costumes by Eugyeene Teh, their eyes concealed by mirrored sunglasses that wrap around their faces, they strike a confident, loud entry. Each with luggage for their perpetual journey strapped to their backs, these after-hours striders command the space. Ready for anything, from their backpacks they pull pink-skinned bananas. Beneath the pumpkin, they assemble for their journey, part of Lane’s “fantasy and reality.” Lane is drawn to the contradictions in Kusama’s work, to the “tension between joy and pain.”[i] Like the plane trees capable of supporting the life of artificial birds only, play tips into sorrow and back again, in the underlying fragility of it all.

[i] Melanie Lane in a printed interview about Pulau (Island) distributed upon arrival at the NGV, and from which all subsequent quotes are pulled from. Pulau (Island), 2025, is commissioned in response to Yayoi Kusama’s work Dots Obsession, 1996/2024–, which operates as both a backdrop and influential reference for the work.