Makes it all worthwhile
The Axolotl Gallery holds a deceptively sugary appeal from Dundas Street; its bright purple shop front displays colourful, surreal paintings promising an array of delectable, cultural sweets for passing dilettantes. The interior, reminiscent of a boutique, is open and uncluttered yet holds various separate spaces to discover unique treasures, trinkets and memories.
The work that most pertains to this twee, knick-knack feel (whilst simultaneously undermining its apparent light-heartedness) is Sarah Wilson’s elegy to her adoptive parents through sculpture and installation. This includes found sentimental objects – such as ticket stubs, horse shoes, figurines, badges and condoms – encased and displayed in small boxes of resin. These intensely personal curios are arranged and fossilised to form new narrative meanings, the stand-alone piece being the half-encased work shoes of Wilson’s father, visually arresting as the thick, translucent resin distorts the worn texture of the leather, evoking a strange transformation of mundane objects into haunted relics and the absurdity of simple human endeavour in the face of mortality.
