It's a triple treat - review of Life Inside a Triangle

The human condition and its influence on our emotions , thoughts or actions are the focus of the three exhibitions currently showing at Umbrella Studio on Flinders Street West.

On the lower floor gallery, Anthony Edwards presents the life of Industrial Metal musician Larry Underwood via works showing Underwood's progression from serious artist to disgruntled and broken human being fighting against the consumerist focus of today's imperfect world in Broken Spirit.

Underwood's frailty is exposed, while surrounded by the media machine's tools of trade, CD Graphics through which to entice the viewer and T-shirts promoting the band.

Underwood states "Upon this axe i have ground my soul until there was nothing left but an empty soul" in reflexive script behind a wall installation featuring his principle tool of trade, his guitar.

A digitally manipulated print, Untitled 12, shows the bones of music past scattered across the parking lot of an industrial space, a disenchanted musician crouching angst ridden in the fore ground.

Untitled 4, another large digital image, shows a veritable smoking gun, indicating the death of musical integrity at the hands of our consumer society.

In untitled 9 we see Underwood as the tortured soul suspended in his cage from the gallows of his industry.

Underwood remains an enigma, a paradox fighting against the very machine he needs to survive.

Stepping onto the upper gallery floor the viewer is immediately struck by the contrast from dark pessimism to the uplifting light glowing from the works of Imogen Rogers in her exhibition Life Inside A Triangle.

Rogers' paintings are all about emotion, feelings from across the spectrum are highlighted using expressive mark making and colour.

These lyrical works link aspects of imagination, thought and feeling via the idea of seeing them in all facets as though they were pieces of fractured light shining through a prism.

Today, I Dream Awake is perhaps the key to the exhibition with its multi layered imagery leading the viewer into Rogers' world.

The works are the antithesis of the darkness of the darkness depicted in Broken Spirit, giving viewers the chance to experience the full gambit of the human psyche.

Also showing in the vault space at the gallery is artist Selena Smith whose mixed media exhibition 2050 questions whether 'Our earth, our destiny, will be viable' by that date.

Smith looks at how our impact on our planets ability to survive.

Suspended centrally in the space we see Globe, a dust ridden, barren planet, water leeched from its surface, a bleak but possible future if current industrial and social practices continue.