While exploring this work, viewers are forced to come to terms with the baggage associated with his choice of materials. Old and worn chairs and toys, for instance, watch parts, and heritage seeds draw associations with the past. Ash, herbs, flowers and other materials refer to ritual, whereas other organic material, sometimes dead, dried and shrivelled, evokes life cycles. These are some of the ghosts referred to by the artist in his exhibition title and they are used as a kind of vocabulary along with the objects themselves to produce metaphoric reflections on life and the human condition.

Rath tackles some uncomfortable subject matter, Alma's Twilight, for instance addresses a kind of melancholic beauty associated with old age and the celebration of life as it draws to a close. Whatever Shall Remain- Have You Forgotten How to Pray addresses the loss of knowledge inter-generationally. Its namesake, subtitled Lost in the Baghdad Invasion, addresses the same, but in a neo-colonial context. As we know the invasion of Iraq has resulted in tremendous human and physical loss and the extraordinary looting of material culture in a place considered by many to be the birthplace of civilisation. Culturally, the loss may be irretrievable.

Passage Mythologies: The Entropy of Wonder, addresses a different kind of loss experienced as the inevitable consequence of life's journey. Aging, the loss of memory and the deterioration of the body are represented here by hands cast from latex, which has similar characteristics to skin. Herbs and other material that have relevance to ritual and rites of passage are added to the composition suggesting the passage of time and the progression of life stages. The chair, a metaphor for the structure of the body, in its aged state can no longer function properly without support. Passage Mythologies has been installed opposite Haunt: Tales of Frail Conditions adding another dimension, and an interesting dialogue.

More ephemeral ghosts, specifically, the work of minimalist artist Carl Andre, are referenced in the positioning of Pyre (How Will You Renew What Has Passed?) and Removed (Histories of the Disappeared). Pyre? is a recreation and modification of the 1971 work by Andre, while Removed? references similar influences to Andre's Pile. Significantly, Removed also occupies the same space that Pile inhabited in a recent exhibition at the Two Rivers Gallery, evoking not only the lives of the disappeared, as the artist indicates in a statement about the work, but art history as well.

The work that comprises this exhibition evokes responses that range from the visceral to the intellectual to the purely aesthetic. They are personal reflections on life, although they speak to issues and concerns that we can all relate to at one level or another. Rath has provided statements for each work that assist in their decoding, but in spite of how personal they may be they, are ultimately born of the human condition and reflect us all. These are Perry Rath's Ghosts, but if you look closely enough you are bound to find some of your own.

George Harris
Curator
Two Rivers Gallery