Simone Slee: Time holding up and Bryan Spier: Lamellar paintings

Simone Slee and Bryan Spier construct visual experiences that hinge on perception—on the subtle, often disorienting gap between what is seen and what is understood. Presented together, their works create a dialogue in which material certainty gives way to visual ambiguity.

Simone Slee’s latest sculptural series, Time holding up, brings glass and rock into a charged conversation. Adhering to the Modernist maxim of “truth to materials,” her sculptures resist overt illusion while seeming improbable: rocks appear suspended, glass mimics solidity, and surfaces destabilise the eye. Forms lean, slump, compress and support one another, making what holds as significant as what is held. Time holding up coincides with Slee’s major solo exhibition, Light time, at Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Bryan Spier similarly uses material effects to create visual ambiguity. His suite of paintings and works on paper extend his inquiry into abstraction as both perceptual and material condition. The exhibition title references the Latin word "lamella", (thin plate or layer), and Spier's meticulous application of paint in thin overlapping layers to create a stratified surface. His constructed surfaces oscillate between flatness and depth; edges dissolve and reassert themselves; planes hover in a state of unresolved tension. Spier employs optical effects and trompe l’oeil not as mimicry, but as a means of destabilising visual certainty.

Slee and Spier’s works invite a prolonged act of looking that oscillates between recognition and doubt.