‘Before the Age of the Museum’ presents a series of recent works by Andrew Hazewinkel, reflecting his enduring fascination with classics, cognitive archaeology and material engagement theory. The exhibition brings together new large-format photographic works with digitally photo-mediated screen prints, video and sculpture alongside site-responsive works installed throughout the ground floor and basement levels of Michael Bugelli Gallery’s historic Ingle Hall, in Hobart. As one of Australia’s first Georgian buildings, the space bears the spirit of an era of scientific and philosophical enquiry – the age of the first public museums.
However, this is no museum. Hazewinkel’s works are divorced from their archaeological and art historical context. Untitled (Antikythera 4) (2017) is a series of photographs depicting marble statues unearthed from the famed Antikythera shipwreck, 1901. Shrouded in darkness, they conjure up private vaults or ocean depths. The figures wear the scars of time as geological and marine forces have coaxed a return to nature, disrupted by exhumation. The artist echoes these forms with stones and shells unearthed from the recesses of Ingle Hall.

Andrew Hazewinkel, Untitled (Antikythera 4), 2017, digital C-type photograph, 90 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Bugelli Gallery, Tasmania
Alongside these curios, a readymade is prominently displayed on a disc of marble. This object was dredged from the Tiber in Rome, its dimensions and features deceptively hinting at something marvellous. What promises to be a marble head is in actual fact the cast of a plastic shopping bag. Consistent with all great archaeological discoveries is the ability for material culture to catapult us into the past. Despite its humble constitution, this object is saturated with urgency and ecstasy.
Material Collision (Staring Together at the Stars) Parts 1, 2, 3 (2017) features images of Roman statues produced from 19th century glass negatives. These plates were created by the European agent for the Boston Museum of Fine Art and are now held in the archive of the British School of Rome. Relics from the great age of collecting, they document antiquities in methodical ‘shorthand’ that renders the classical objects thoroughly contemporary. Each image depicts the nape of the neck and posterior cranium of an anonymous male at different stages of life. Hazewinkel has scaled the heads up, monumentalising not their heroic status, but their vulnerability. The enlarged imperfections from the original stone and plaster form moonscapes, and the materiality of the film, a broad sweep of the galaxy. Printed on carborundum sandpaper, the textures are gently illuminated and the resulting effect is pathos and power in equal measure.

Andrew Hazewinkel, Untitled (Antikythera 2), 2017, digital C-type photograph, 90 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Bugelli Gallery, Tasmania
The artist describes Suspicious Marble (Omphale) (2017) as an academic excavation. He restores the focus of the myth of Omphale, matriarch of Lydia, which traditionally champions Hercules. Hazewinkel empowers Omphale, an immense curtain of leather hides draped from the ceiling, each screen-printed with the image of her marble likeness. In a fabulous role-reversal, she adopts the garb of the demigod – his lion skin flows from her shoulders and his club rests at her thigh. The inertia of stone is enlivened by the liquidity of leather. Once again, the artist employs a kind of material alchemy.
Hazewinkel explains his interest in working with material culture as an effort ‘to establish and uncover contemporary social legacies of ancient material culture, stories and archetypes.’ The works sing to one another, associations freely refract and converge with an exacting harmony, in such a way that time dissolves and humanity crystallises.
Pip Mott is a writer and curator based in Hobart.
Michael Bugelli Gallery
Until 31 March, 2018
Tasmania