KATHY TEMIN Indoor Gardens Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney We are warned, by Amanda Rowell in the accompanying text

to the exhibition of Kathy Temins latest works, that here: the animal qualities show themselvesMinimalism is combined with sentimentalism. Temins most recent solo show was indeed a strange, synthetic pleasure garden, a cosy nook where Modernism slipped off its shoes and went walking on the grass or at least, shag-pile carpet a plastic paradise of fake fur and pebble-dash dcor, where the straightjacket of formalism was replaced by a flower in your hair. Or so it would seem. Temin has become widely acknowledged, both within Australia and beyond, for her critically rigorous yet materially awkward works that are often interpreted as a post-feminist appropriation of various paradigms sighted in Modernist art history. One of the most significant Australian artists of her generation, her DIY, almost drag take on Malevich, Stella, Judd, Oldenburgh, Duchamp; as well as Wittgenstein and Benjamin, is a powerful attack on the monumentalising, heroic and often chauvinistic rhetoric of Modern art past, and a cautionary tale for the present. Often involving cheap, overtly man-made materials, her works have the appearance of something roughly cobbled together or misshapen, deliberately under-cutting any idealism associated with the art-object and positing instead something far more anxious and awkward. This clumpy, drag slippage makes their Modernist credentials suspect, at best a flawed echo or cheap imitation. Such rough fashioning should not be confused with poor craftsmanship Temins works are sturdy in the extreme, sometimes adopting a belt-and-braces approach in their lumpen making, where seams are over-sown and more than enough glue used to bind things together. This unevenness seems to grow out of an excess of the homespun, a material oddness that quickly becomes familiar as a human, rather than bermensch, trait. Indoor Gardens included the work Camouflage Cactus (2006), one of a trio of cacti forms displayed in a separate space to the main exhibition. Unlike the even green colouring of the other two, it was made up of military camouflage synthetic fur, its silhouette like a cartoon-drawing of a cactus, with two stubby arms protruding either side. Was this cactus over-compensating, borrowing the perceptual device (partially developed by Cubist artists) that imitates the appearance of nature, to represent itself as a natural form? Undeniably figurative, it quickly dissembled into pathos and our heart went out to it.

Similar feelings were hard to avoid when the principle works were encountered, where camouflage was replaced by a sea of white fur redolent of Meret Oppenheim, Mona Hatoum in an incredibly seductive gesture, that corrupted the Classical/Modernist ideal of white-on-white into a kind of hairy-Suprematism. A huge white fluffy cube, White Cube: Fur Garden (2007) sat squatly off-centre in the gallery like one of Platos ideal forms gone feral, with a soft fuzzy landscapes of trees behind. Cute and comforting, the toy-like objects were also conspicuously out of place, and/or off-scale. The largest, human-sized green stuffed trees, Family Garden (2007) slumped under their own weight. Most disturbing was the mute impassivity of the forms, like a layer of foundation make-up without mascara and lipstick. This play upon sensuous (if tacky) surface in contrast to subtly menacing form was found throughout the exhibition: perhaps most emphatically in Mantle Garden (2006-7), where the white-fur trimmed upper mantle had as a counterpart a low-level, seemingly boarded-up cat-flap or Kauffman-esque doorway, leading to an unknowable but presumably abject internal space. Details such as this doorway suggested that the objects were somehow inhabited; or, at a larger scale, to be used in daily living. Suave yet kitsch, works like Mantle Garden and Sideboard Garden (2006-7) were both Pop furniture and shrine-like sculpture; domestic space and rural idyll. Sideboard Garden especially spoke of a suburban, domestic attempt at an eighteenth-century landscape folly: Ludwig II of Bavaria meets Blue Peter. Like props from the hide-out of the eponymous Goldfinger of the 1964 Bond movie, Temins objects are flawed stand-ins for superdesigned artefacts; heightened simulations of luxury commodities. What characterised these works most significantly however is their relationship to nature and its anthropomorphism. This operated at various levels, from the direct imitation of tree shapes, to the Scandinavian design-influenced nature forms of decorative stucco pebble-shapes; and most obviously in the titles. As Rowell suggests, abstract protuberances become soft cheeks, bosomy trees. Botanical soft furnishings. Temin makes a segue from the formalism of both Modernist and design practices, to the form-less, haptic domain of the natural world, where sentiment or animal feeling, as opposed to human intellect guides her practice. This upturns the hierarchy of Modernist thinking whilst simultaneously borrowing its terms; co-opting our biological empathy with nature into a critique of didactic stylistics. Finally turning from the massive flur-clad central cube, I was suddenly facing the equally dramatic, sheer face of a sandstone cliff shrouded with fern, just a few metres outside the double-story window of the gallery. Temins animal cunning had me cornered.

Image: Sideboard Garden, 2006-7; from the advert and invite