Visual Arts/Elisa Crossing: Move Me! Civic Art Bureau, until August 31. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS

Elisa Crossing is one of Canberra’s well known artists and a long established lecturer in painting at the ANU School of Art and Design.

The emergence of the slow looking movement that has evolved to encourage us to look up from our screens and notice more of the world around us is pertinent to Crossing who has developed this theme during her extensive art practice. She encourages the viewer to use their memories and related experiences to inhabit the spaces she creates in her works.

Her 2009 series (Still: Airports) depicts the empty architectural spaces in airports that we don’t notice when filled with passengers. In the 2011 series Misdeeds the architectural settings are staged in such a way as to suggest something missing from the familiar imagery of a medieval cloister or a Dutch domestic interior.

In this latest exhibition Crossing has constructed the architectural setting of the artists’ studio creating in its space multiple images of stacked canvasses, standing easels and light filled windows. Our imagination supplies the missing elements from the studio empty of its human inhabitants and any evidence of painterly equipment.

The image of the draped white lounge in the work, Intermission, obviously lacks the cliché of the artistically posed nude. And although the studio space the artist depicts is generous in scale, it is not a welcoming space. We are barred from entry by painting frames, easels and furniture.

Even in Press Play, with its light filled open space, the pristine white floor flanked by high windows is intimidating.  The intensity of this private vision is mediated by a beautiful modulated tonal colour scheme and the inclusion of glimpses of romantic landscapes that subtly intrude into these cooly observed interiors.

The 1767 Rococo painting The Swing by Jean-Honore Fragonard with a beribboned woman on a swing arrested it seems in full motion and its lurking male voyeur is a clever illusion to the artist as voyeur and the to and fro movement of the artist at work . The artist selects the vision of what is seen and reconciles it with what is to be painted – a movement of focus and refocusing that takes the artist from one reality to the realm of the creative imagination. The focus of each work shifts from the observed objects painted by Crossing to a more speculative vision that is brought to the work by our own imagination.

This is an intriguing, beautifully realised exhibition that asks the viewer to move beyond the painting surface and engage with the artist’s imaginative vision in a creative dialogue.

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