The Thousands

Some of the most striking works around Adelaide in the last few years have been Ray Harris’ video pieces. You’ve seen her crying, mascara running down her cheeks, or blowing glitter from her mouth, right? They are works that are simple in concept, but rich in meaning and hard to turn away from. Ray’s emotional and physical commitment to her art is impossible to ignore. Time dissolves when you’re immersed in her work, and Hold me Close and Let me Go will be no different.

This time around she blends her interest in sculpture, video and installation into five large wooden crates, each with a different interior. Two videos add to the exhibition in a similarly tactile way, one with her holding a melting life-size sculpture of a woman, and the other wrestling a life-size dough person. Something that’s also really clear in Ray’s practice is that whenever she has played a role in curating an exhibition, the pieces all just seem to work together. The way the exhibition functions says just as much as the individual artworks. For her, juxtaposing sculpture and video helps communicate the ‘inner spaces and outer actions of psychological struggles’.

There’s something about Ray’s artist statement for this exhibition that really resonates. Dissatisfaction, lingering, yearning and being tied to something that you never actually had. It’s like a call to dreamers and lost souls, of which in this city there seem to be many.