curated by Sam Ferris
22/6/23 - 8/7/23
Ron Adams
Craig Bender
David Lawrey + Jacki Middleton
Fiona Lowry
Evelyn Malgil
Adam Norton
Samuel Quinteros
Catalogue
Room Sheet
“Allons! whoever you are, come travel with me!
Traveling with me, you find what never tires.”
Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open Road
This exhibition was inspired by travel, in particular those trips where you find yourself nimbly moving from one place to another, drawn in by inclinations and succumbing to a floating feeling. For me, the same sensation can occur when reading static artworks, when you allow yourself to melt into a setting or atmosphere that has been created.
The works in this exhibition exceed boundaries and while a sense of vastness is created, they provide a certain intimacy giving room for one’s own adventure. We are suspended in Space; gliding above the Kimberley; emerging from an otherworldly icy pool. We are directed and disoriented; Nature has felled a man-made structure; elsewhere the body merges with or is landscape.
Through various pictorial techniques, the distance between the picture and the viewer is collapsed, an experience akin to a cinematic journey. A sense of a (new) Australian Gothic prevails - post-apocalyptic and/or romantic outcomes are entirely possible, and the associated and inexorable drama feels more real, as you melt into it.
- Sam Ferris