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november 7 - november 25

Self portraits and other nightmares

Graham Doyle

A man sits alone in the park watching the leaves twirl and the occasional bird industriously flitting back and forth. The bleached wooden bench lies softly beneath him. It’s not peak hour in the park right now. The occasional person walks past, the occasional boisterous child throws themselves onto the grass and the odd cyclist cuts through.

A small black sketch book sits on his lap and a pen becomes a prosthetic limb as it flows from his fingers. Self to paper, paper to self, self to paper. The book’s black binding holds the extended lobes of his cerebrum. The pages are filled with green squiggles, black surly lines and pencil sketched with tippex highlights.

Graeme Doyle’s work is raw and honest. Nothing is hidden from the viewer. The pages from his black book lie chaffed, bare and unfeigned. Self portraits and other nightmares is the splaying of Doyle's mind and the viewer is invited for a glimpse between binding.

Graham Doyle’s friend, Peter Wegner, was the 2006 winner of the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with his painting of Graeme Doyle entitled Wounded Poet 2006. Doyle has been Wegner’s subject for over 100 portraits. Where Wegner has exposed the surface of Doyle, self portraits and other nightmares unravels the interior.

So brave, so bold, so desolate    

Julie Keating

Julie Keating’s slow cool world of blue is an errie place.  It is a world drowned, but not dead.

Keating marries the incongruous by presenting the inorganic forms of industrial pipes and refuse within the all-encompassing and accepting sea. We are not sure what part people play in this world but it is a much less powerful role than that of the original creators of these structures

In this place, the weight of the water slows us down, represses our ability to move and think and yet seems to offer us a clarity of vision. The industrial structures stand monument to all our sophisticated skills in engineering, both social and economic, but they are dwarfed by the forces of Nature in this new environment. 

Time is incidental here and one could almost expect the canvas to slip slowly down the wall and settle, quietly, at the bottom of the gallery.

Swatch    

Sophie Knezic

The lure of pattern lies behind these works on paper by artist Sophie Knezic. Segments of pattern samples are the point of departure for delicate pencil, gouache and watercolour drawings that mimic the format of textile swatch books.

Inspired primarily from pre-20^th century Japanese textile traditions, the drawings respond in particular to the textile patterns comprised of a repeating field of small motifs known as komon. Examples of komon evident in Japanese textile imagery, such as schematic images of rippling water, falling wisteria petals, dew on grass or unopened blossoms, are used by the artist as a point of departure for new pattern works that gently distort these original designs and rework them into a heightened palette of vivid colour. In the horizontality and smallness of scale, two sheet format, and faux embroidery mark-making, the works are suggestive of both cloth samples and open pattern books.

Alongside the traditional Japanese motifs are schematic and simplified landscape architectural drawings. Composed into similar fields of reduced motifs, the forms are filtered through an imaginary Japanese textile process and reconstituted into komon. Some of these forms are distinct, others are faint traces, yet all combine into linear patterns creating a gauzy form of pictorial space.

Patterns, gardens, swatches and maps coalesce into miniature fields of undulating rhythms, engaged in a play of repetition and dissolve.

Sophie Knezic is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at the Victoria College of the Arts.