Wet and Dry
Adelaide art scene, March 2026
Lisa Tomasetti Not Sinking, Rising
Paul Lacey Way Over Yonder
BMG Art, at Mezzanine, Kent Town, 20 February – 8 March
Oh, sweet surrender. Venice’s charms have beguiled artists for centuries – Europe’s Bali for all those romantic souls hoping to recharge the creative batteries or mask up, if only for a while, and act the latter-day flaneur, gliding through the sumptuous decay of faded glories. The French novelist Marcel Proust remarked ‘When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become – incredibly, but quite simply – my address.’ From Canaletto to JMW Turner into the modern era, artists have been drawn to La Serenissima’s alluring combination of architectural splendour and reflective canals. Heysen spent quality time there emulating and unwittingly outperforming his hero, JMW Turner. Arthur Streeton painted his best works there. The modern era cast the city as setting for iconic films, among them Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’, Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’ and Iain Softley’s ‘The Wings of a Dove’. But the membrane that separates romance and nostalgia from the predation of contemporary commercialism is very thin, as seen in the proliferation of advertising on iconic buildings such as the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which has seen massive billboards attached to heritage buildings under restoration, advertising Coca Cola, Rolex, smart phones and the like.
But undeterred, artists still cling to an imagined, timeless past. A recent riffle through an online Blue Thumb catalogue, produced enough canals complete with bobbing gondolas, to fill Sydney Harbour several times over. Lisa Tomassetti’s large format photographs, inspired by Venice, stand clear of this ruck. They carry the imprint of an international photographer at the top of her game. Her stella career includes high profile international exhibitions, representation in significant public and private collections, and numerous awards. Relevant to the current BMG Not Sinking, Rising exhibition is her extensive experience as a highly sought after still photographer in film and television. Consider the advertising images on streaming services, magazines, billboards and buses. Tomasetti’s credits include Shine, Star Wars Episode 2, Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Sapphires. Of particular interest is her role and output as the international tour photographer for the Australian Ballet, touring New York, Beijing, San Francisco and Tokyo. Her images of costumed, athletic dancers leaping and spinning in gritty urban locales are spectacular to say the least.
The images in Not Sinking, resonate with this sense of fixing the moment for maximum impact. Her period-gowned models, two young women, pose variously, fixing the viewer with a steely gaze as in La Serenissima, or turning away in a state of private emotion. The large size of these inkjet images allows the eye to linger and crawl, exploring textures, patterns and architectural details. Il Cedimento, positions the actor, mid-distance, on a bridge, hovering like a glimpsed vision of the lost daughter in’ Don’t Look Now.’ A loose translation of ‘Cedimento’ reads as ‘subsidence’ which loops back to the exhibition’s theme and perhaps Venice’s predicament as a sinking city.
So how to evaluate this body of work? They are luxe. Their presence in an eclectic interior design setting would seal the deal in terms of referencing all the agreeable associations we harbour about this most seductive and celebrated city. But let’s not forget that Tomasetti cut her teeth, here in Adelaide, as a conceptual photographer. I believe this experience, while it didn’t lead to immediate success in the world of professional and filmic photography, has always informed her judgement. There is something quite unsettling about these images which contradicts a cosy reading of them as products of still photographic sessions on a period drama film set. The viewer must ask why the artist has gone to this trouble. An indulgence? To amuse us or offer some costumed frou-frou to feed contemporary appetites for romantic fiction? I’m not convinced. I’m invoking a sense of historical context which regards these images as a latter-day investigation into a love affair with the past, a love affair with Venice and the casting of female models to create a conversation about the coopting of the past to interrogate the present. The antecedents to these images are paintings and photographs of the Later Victorian and Edwardian eras. These were unsettling times, particularly for painters, not unlike the discomfort that AI is currently creating for all image makers. Pictorialism, the art of dressing up photographs with soft focus and manipulated tones, created a new language of expression. Into this mix came period costume subject renditions as both painters and photographers attempted to keep the link between new and ‘old master’ art intact. Then along came the ‘problem picture’ in which images of women were choreographed to reflect on changing gender-based roles.
It’s been quite some time since Venice stood in the spotlight, here in Adelaide. Victorian artist Angela Cavalieri (with SA artists Sue Boettcher, Geoff Gibbons, Amanda Lawler and Tricia Ross) at Studio Brompton in Fringe 2017, is the most recent I can recall. The vitality and diversity of that exhibition and now Tomasetti’s powerhouse images suggest that there’s a lot of water left in this well.
Paul Lacey, Way Over Yonder
Lacey’s amusing images of a fanciful West World rely on cliched assumptions about territory created by Hollywood, cowboy comics and tourist messaging about an imagined past when men wore side whiskers, trains made lonesome whistling noises, riders rode through blue sage and cactus grew like soursobs. The titles (‘Mexican Cowboy’, ‘Me more Cowboy than you’, Shady Grove’) read like title tracks on a bar room ballads LP. If you riff off the deliberate hokiness of the subjects and treatment you’ll warm to the humour and, I suspect affection, to be found within. Lacey, has a knowing way with paint, enlivening passages with brush textures and shying away from detail to keep the image uncluttered. The real west was far more dangerous and desperate than we can ever imagine. Travel Lacey’s world. You’ll enjoy the ride.