The installation by Estelle Ihász, No Artificial Flavours comes as a bit of a surprise, given the title. It certainly doesn’t look natural. Upon entering the main gallery, having negotiated the rickety stairs at Bus and passed the impeccably delicate pencil drawings of Lewis Gallagher, you may find yourself shielding your eyes or reaching for the sunglasses–this work is visually saccharine: it does to your eyes what sugar does to your teeth.

Four narrow shelves, painted glossy white, run in even parallels around the corner of the room. Upon these shelves, some free standing, some leaning back against the wall, are a collection of flat Perspex panels in differing bright colours, shapes and sizes. The forms of these panels echo the shape of an urban planer the map of a continent, with their rigid geometric lines and abstract composition. Some shapes are repeated, some seem to be unique one-offs and some appear to be morphed together from others, like mutants of the DNA strain from which they all spring.

The colours of the Perspex shapes ranges from fluorescent pink to acid lime green with many lurid tones in between. Their scale ranges from the mundane to the minute; there is even one miniscule little shape piggybacking on a slightly larger one–two for the price of one? Certain forms standout amongst all the jagged geometry sprawling before us, some because of their comparative size, but one that keeps catching my eye is a bright orange disc. This round form might be a red herring, a brief glimpse of actual perfection amongst all the promises.

No Artificial Flavours makes you feel like a bewildered child in an austere candy store that sells only fluorescent, geometric Rorschach tests. It’s as if I’m having a nightmare after watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and 2001 consecutively. I find myself playing games with the shapes–there’s a chicken, an egg; oh, and that’s some kind of machine from Star Wars…and a hundred other pop-culture references that bubble slowly through the gooey muck of the brain to the surface. If I listed all the things I recognize amongst all this, Rorschach would have a field day.

By presenting these shapes as the ambiguous currency of an invisible trade (we could be standing in a chic perfumery; all white with brightly packaged vapours displayed upon the shelves) Ihász calls to question the nature of consumer mentality. When we encounter something we feel that we may want, our subconscious and imaginations are projected onto that thing, recreating it as something desirable, if not irresistible. As the title purports, this product contains ‘no artificial flavours’, it is all natural. But the objects are plastic, I can see that much; perhaps the ‘natural’ here is our symptomatic and routine response to the objects we amass as modern consumers.

I think about Guy Debord’s drawing for the Naked City. Ihász’s flat, yet sculptural forms are reminiscent of the fragments of Paris that the Situationists mapped out ‘psycho-geographically’. Perhaps the psycho-geography of today’s city is a virtual one, and the kind of ambience that moved Debord to wander through certain parts of the city now lures unsuspecting city-dwellers into maze-like department stores, leaving them to drift amongst the tantalizingly displayed merchandise. The plastic shards presented before us, if viewed as fragments of a larger map, are certainly suggestive of the way in which humans may consume space, and the absurd idea that space may be possessed.

One thing that seems certain is that the work is about consumption. The title is an assurance that the product is genuine, but genuine what? And can I actually buy one, or are they for display only? The precariousness with which they seem to be perched on the shelf would suggest that it is a ‘lookout don’t touch’ situation. These goods sit coolly, quietly mocking my unachievable desire to touch them, to posses them. They seem destined to play out their infinite existence–Perspex doesn’t decompose, does it?–in perpetual commercial stasis. But it’s probably just as well; none of those colours would match my furniture…

The artist thanks Andy for the review. Text © the Author. Reproduced with permission.

Estelle Ihász’s work details the journey towards Canberra of her migrant grandparents–Julia and Sandor Ihász. Ihász takes us on a journey from Hungary, through to Austria and Italy, to Sydney and finally Canberra. We travel by the wealth of documents kept by her grandmother Julia Ihász–postcards, passports, identity cards, tickets and photographs. We begin by and return to a postcard portrait of Julia as a girl. The trip between is mainly a linear passage, with only a few byways which, when explored, returns to the main road. This predetermined arrangement of the material is a necessary structure that allows us to understand and follow the Ihász’s path.

The documents are viewed in chronological order but they are presented with no translation or explanation. Instead, these objects are reproduced in sufficient detail to allow a virtually tactile encounter with the old and treasured family records. This allows us to ‘feel’ the embossed cover of a leather bound passport, or the brittle cracked cloth binding of another. The sensation of handlings enhanced by being able to ‘turn’ a page over: when we roll the mouse across its surface, the reverse side is shown. Every sign of wear is evident: the scratches and creases on photographs, the remnants of paper that were previously stuck on the back, the curling edges of stamps; and the stains of rusty staples.

By emphasising the materiality of the objects, Ihász allows us to get closer to the people she represents. We are encouraged to observer carefully, to note the signs of age appearing on the faces in the later photographs, to see that her grandmother has been fastidious keeping her papers–her grandfather rougher. Or is that because his documents are folded so that he could carry them in his pocket, whereas hers have been kept in a handbag? In being able to ‘touch’ the Ihász’s’ personal things, we are touched by their story.

This work reminds us that the current generation of globally mobile workers is not the first to trade nationalities in search of home. Previous generations may not have always had the luxury of choosing to do so. In tracking the Ihász’s’ shifts between countries and nationalities the user may become anxiously aware of the ultimate homelessness of a stateless person. A strong desire for home emanates from this work, not so much from the snapshots of the house in suburban Australia, but from the evidence of time spent in transition.

It brings to mind stories of people who ended up in Australia simply because it was somewhere other than war torn Europe. People who took what they could get, or at least the next ship out, people whose fate was determined by an arbitrary authority or set of circumstances. One of the main characters in this drama of post-war migration, Estelle’s grandfather, changes his name between Hungary and Austria then back before reaching Australia. This reminds me oaf story of a friend’s father who is known in Australia by his middle instead of his first name. His name was accidentally transposed on wartime identification papers and he was afraid of spoiling his chances of being relocated by revealing his papers were not correct. So to his family he is one name and to his new friends in Australia he is another. The Ihász journey underlines a dilemma common to migrants, their children and other displaced people–that home is neither where they are or where they came from.

First published in Urban Projects 1999-2002: Cul de Sac, exhibition catalogue, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, ACT, 2002.Text © the Author. Reproduced with permission.