City living: Karen Ward at VAC gallery

Karen Ward's show at the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre includes a painting with a title that quotes Charles Baudelaire: "the city changes faster than the human heart".

This beautiful but disturbing idea tells us something about the power of art, and its goal, to hold a moment, to capture the fleeting of human existence and focus, stilling the transitory and perhaps, then, enabling our understanding.

Ward says she is interested in the way living in high-rise apartments, which she compares to "human aviaries", may change the way we not only live but also think. She refers to the city as a kind of "living creature" like a brain, and, like a brain, it offers unpredictable pathways. As a pulse moves through a brain, and builds connections, so a walker can move through a city, crossing gaps and linking with new parts of the city, new people, new meanings.

These ideas, both challenging and optimistic, result in a collection of works that are both elegant and brooding. Geometric like buildings, they are grids of glossy colour, maze-like, slightly jail-like, creating barriers.

Another work has a Thoreau quote as its title: "it's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see". Thus, you have to let your brain free when you look at one of these works, with their blocks of colour, and grids of wood laid over a wilder background, sometimes dark and sometimes diaphanously white. 

Although the artist's statement talks about the rapid growth of Melbourne, the big four-panel work in this show, "The forest is never far away" seems a very Bendigo painting, reminding us of how close the bush is to this neat, fast-growing little city.

Even though there is something solid about the works, because several are more like wall-hung sculptures than paintings, the key to each of them is the movement Ward infuses in the composition. Your vision is never able to rest, bouncing off glossy surfaces along lines and around angles: an analogy of what it is like to look out a window in a dense urban space.

This is a show of ideas, and Ward makes many references to writers such as Italo Calvino. And yet, at the same time, it is an exhibition about the very basics of painting/sculpture: colour and line in space, and our emotional response to form. 

These are neat, almost crisp works, strong and tactile. Whether you find them calling you in, or sending you out, will depend, maybe, on your reaction to city living.

Karen Ward, Synapse, at the La Trobe University VAC Gallery, View Street, until September 4.