Gail Hastings’ work situation no. 41: happy new year began with a greeting card received through the mail. On the outside of the card is an arrangement of geometric shapes repeated as a pattern, overlaid with the text HAPPY NEW YEAR. The inside of the card has two phrases: ‘You didn’t look, did you?’ and then ‘Of course, didn’t you?’. This card was posted out and is freely available in the exhibition. It is one of eight cards in the work. The others, which range in size from 45cm to 360cm (folded) bear the same design and happy new year greeting, although they differ in colour. Each of the colours appears on one of the eight objects within the work itself and each card is in a size proportionate to its corresponding object. The pattern on the card is a two-dimensional drawing of the lay-out of the whole work. The viewer finds themselves ‘situated’ in between the scales of a repeated pattern, both inside and outside, concurrently.

The cards were sent by the artist to the curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales according to a schedule devised by the Bureau of Repetition in Art. The schedule allocated eight different days and times for the cards to be posted. The curator filled in the time and date that the cards were received. The data collected showed the temporal spaces between the time of the cards being sent and the time of their reception. This data forms the basis of Hastings’ wall painting in the work. Each horizontal stripe represents both the colour of the card and the duration of the card’s travelling time. situation no. 41: happy new year also includes watercolour floorplans that repeat the same pattern as on the cards. The watercolours are from The Encyclopaedia of Repetitions in Art. They trace a conversation between two people which concerns the act of looking at situation no. 41: happy new year.

A complex work that recalls Minimalist sculpture, Constructivist painting and the conceptual projects of artists like Alighiero e Boetti, situation no. 41: happy new year proposes two different experiences of time: directional (the cards being sent and received) and circular (the repeated pattern). In its circularity, there is a continual remembering of the pattern as the viewer’s eyes and body move through its differing scales. It is possible that on each viewing of each manifestation of the pattern, our temporality and our memory differs. Yet there is also a sense of the exact replay, in the way that a film or a piece of recorded music is replayed again and again. This may be seen as a parable for the ways in which memory works: significant events that recur in our minds become filtered through the present moment.

Hastings’ objects also look like props waiting for a set of characters to activate the space through chance encounters. A stage-set for a performance about time, situation no. 41: happy new year posits questions about art: Where does art begin and end? When is art repeating itself? How does the viewer search an art work for meaning? Gail Hastings’ fictional Encyclopaedias and Bureaus seem to offer uncontestable knowledge — answers to these questions — yet they are as abstract as the repeated pattern itself. Umberto Eco says that society filters things out through encyclopaedias. Perhaps our movement through the space and time of situation no. 41: happy new year is like wandering through a library looking for a book and instead finding another one that is all the more surprising and engaging: an endless process that is circular and temporal, mirroring life itself.