Remote sense of unease at the MCA's South of no North exhibition

SOUTH of no North is neither a retrospective in the usual sense nor a group exhibition but something different and quite unusual.

Laurence Aberhart's Kamala, Lyttelton

SOUTH of no North is neither a retrospective in the usual sense nor a group exhibition but something different and quite unusual: a survey of an artist's work matched with that of two others with whom he feels an affinity.

It is not just a matter of including a handful of things considered as sources of inspiration or models but of illustrating parallel and intersecting concerns and, in the process, of according equal importance to all three artists and weaving a dialogue between them.

For many years Noel McKenna has painted small, low-key pictures in a faux-naif style, whimsical but quietly biting images drawing on the apparently anodyne subject matter of suburban life. He has chosen to have his work shown in the company of an American photographer of the deep south, William Eggleston (born 1939), and a New Zealander, Laurence Aberhart (born 1949), both of whom similarly find their inspiration in the everyday, and often in subject matter that we tend to overlook or dismiss as banal or ugly.

The worlds that all three evoke, in their various ways, are not only suburban but provincial, remote from the sophistication of the contemporary metropolis; so remote, indeed, that they often suggest loneliness, desolation or even a more sinister sense of menace. Houses and industrial buildings tend to be empty, shuttered, as though abandoned. Signs seem to refer to some defunct business that may once have been carried on there; Aberhart's garage is at least closed, if not closed forever; Eggleston's rusted rooftop with a sign implying - with an exclamation mark - that peaches are to be purchased there fails to convince us that this is still a place to stop for fruit.

Such details remind us that we are far from the city, where the pace and energy of the economic struggle for life sweep aside failed and moribund businesses and replace them with new ones. But these artists are not drawn to the passion for efficiency and productivity that keeps us running on our treadmills; they are interested in worlds where this cycle has stalled or seized up and we can contemplate human life in a dreamlike stasis.

The quest for remoteness from the mirage of urban sophistication leads all three artists to an interest in the experience of children, for whom the time and pace of productivity are meaningless and who are more interested in things that are entirely useless, such as the big pineapples and big bananas that are the quaint pride of so many provincial towns in Australia. McKenna has a special fondness for these objects that are so incongruous to the adult eye but that to children are a welcome distraction on an otherwise interminable road trip.

The child's view is implicit in Eggleston's tricycle, photographed from a position prone on the ground so that it towers as a colossal form above the distant profile of suburban bungalows. This simple device conveys the child's scale of priorities, which can seem so wildly disproportionate to parents concerned with graver matters, but in a sense it is also a metaphor for the distortions of perspective provoked in all of us when desire or anxiety makes something objectively insignificant momentarily loom larger than everything else in our lives.

Aberhart's own children are his subjects in a series of three circular compositions whose form seems to hint at the enclosure of affective experience: in the first, two of them are seen holding a pet rabbit, while in the third, sadly some months later, they kneel around its grave, which is edged with bricks and planted with flowers and a little cross. In the central image, which is the most affecting and memorable because of its ambiguity, one of the girls is seen lying backwards over the edge of the roof of a house or shed, next to the ladder by which she has just climbed up. Head thrown back, she faces up into the emptiness of the sky, and the context suggests she may be mourning the death of her pet.

A note of darkness beyond the melancholy of the theme is added by the low light levels in these black-and-white pictures, and by the deep penumbra of shadow with which, in the printing process, the artist has surrounded his compositions. It is a note that recalls the so-called gothic sensibility of modern New Zealand art but is also to be found in regional Australia and in the southern backwaters of the US; perhaps it is related to the persistence of a naive but intense and sometimes twisted and neurotic religious feeling in such places, further woven together here by the fact McKenna has spent time in New Zealand and Aberhart has taken pictures in Eggleston's American south.

Two of Aberhart's interiors share this slightly sinister quality, one implicitly and the other overtly. In the first, the plainness and order of the room and its whiteness suggest a slightly obsessive regime of austerity; in the second, the walls of an untidy and probably filthy bedroom are scrawled with the maniacally repeated tag "Mrs Evil". One of McKenna's paintings is of a boy in a Batman suit; apparently a bit of harmless and childish play, except that he is seated in an empty room surrounded by lit candles, evoking necromantic circles and black magic. Again, one of Aberhart's pictures, taken in the corner of a room, shows a daughter crouching menacingly in a devil mask.

McKenna's painting of a priest is similarly disturbing, though more ambiguous, while the various images of chapels, graves and even extinct animals all seem to brood over mortality and the possibility of the afterlife. In McKenna's Boy's Room, Brisbane, 1967 (2004), presumably a recollection of his childhood, the little cross above the bed is like a catalyst that makes everything else slightly disturbing: the closed cupboard in which a child could easily imagine hidden terrors, the watchful cat in the corner, the shadow cast by the cupboard and the still deeper shadow outside, separating the house from the neighbouring suburban dwelling.

The cross appears again, suspended in the shadowed arch of McKenna's Catholic House, Burwood (2005); the bulbs around it suggest that it must be a neon light, contrasting all the more starkly with the darkness surrounding it, like the blank and starless night sky above. It feels somehow desperate, more a statement of retreat and self-enclosure - a theme echoed by the barred window nearby - than of faith. And there is a similar note of desperation in Aberhart's picture of a broken-down sign in a field, in the middle of nowhere in the American south, assuring us that "prayer works" and inviting us to attend a meeting at the Faith Tabernacle.

The most lyrical expression of this sensibility appears, by a curious coincidence, in two photographs of stone angels represented as mourning over Victorian funerary monuments. Eggleston's is in colour and Aberhart's is in black and white, but what is notable about each is that they approach their subjects with a profound kind of sympathy: it would be easy to treat these works, carved by monumental masons rather than self-conscious artists, as sentimental kitsch, but in fact both the photographers have succeeded in animating them through the use of colour, light and shade in Eggleston's case and composition supported by pure chiaroscuro in Aberhart's, making each into more touching meditations on death than they were purely as sculptural objects.

Once again we see that sympathy tempered by a critical spirit is the path to understanding, while smugness - an inherent risk when picturing lives presumed more insignificant than our own - frustrates the work of the imagination. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this exhibition is the capacity of the artists to see mystery in the banal, to evoke the one without denying the other. The first work we see on entering the gallery, Eggleston's photograph of the interior of a diner, instantly strikes us with this paradox: it is as ordinary, ostensibly as uninteresting as possible, yet through light and colour and the detail of the convex mirror that doubles the room and reveals the photographer it becomes unexpectedly suggestive.

Similarly, Aberhart's block-like building with its closed roller doors in King Konkrete is an image of stubborn muteness overlaid, as though touched by grace, with the delicate early-morning shadow of a leafless winter tree. McKenna's Young Writer's Room, Dargaville 1978 (2009), in its very bareness, makes us wonder in what way this is the room of a writer, until we see the tiny open notebook on the table and realise that this is where the work of the imagination is going to take place. And nowhere is the mystery of banality more tangible than in Eggleston's dark, almost monochrome view of a garden, perhaps early in the morning, and a rain-wet concrete path leading to the front of a house that is utterly ordinary and yet fills us with apprehension.

The transformation of the world into images, the source of all that is mysterious in art, is the subject of a series of little paintings on tiles by McKenna that are juxtaposed in a display case with the objects that served as their models. We are invited to compare the thing and its image, and to observe the choices and decisions that have to be made even in the representation of something as simple as a nail (a thicker line underneath to account for the shadow), as well as the potential of something as innocuous as a pencil sharpener to be endowed with threatening symbolism (the dark holes and the cutting blades).

But we are equally aware of the artifice of image-making in the work of the two photographers, each of whom has made technical choices that were time-consuming and in some respects limiting, yet that give their work its distinctive character. Eggleston, for example, employed the dye transfer technology for his colour prints, achieving a deeper, more painterly and in a sense more artificial palette.

Both use a relatively small format, especially Aberhart, which gives a special poignancy and dry humour to his picture of a photo booth with its sign advertising "Photos enlarged". Indeed Aberhart uses an antique large-format camera, visible as a shadow in one of the photographs, and takes pictures on enormous negatives, which he then prints as direct contact images, so in his case there is literally no enlarging of the print.

This particular use of technically obsolete equipment is part of a refusal of the kind of elaborately staged and manipulated photography we have discussed here recently; but more generally it is an illustration of the principle that artists find inspiration in constraint, not in limitless possibility.

South of no North, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, until May 5.