A group exhibition of contemporary abstraction. New work by Michael Muruste, Peter Poulet, Maeve Woods & Jamin
10 June – 12 July 2015
Michael MURUSTE
Painter
THEN AND NOW. THE STRATEGY OF WITHDRAWAL.
Present day social and political realities are disturbingly similar to that of the modernist era. Global financial crisis, continuous threats to security and accelerated advances in science and technology.
These issues informed the original modernist agenda, an agenda that waivered between optimism and despair, but was still convinced in the supremacy of art and it’s ability to make sense of a quickly changing world.
Born in Burnie i 1955 Michael Muruste has been exhibiting since mid-1980s including solo shows CAST 1997; & Burnie Regional Art Gallery 2001; and group show Register Tasmanian Artist TMAG 2006. Finalist in City of Hobart 1997; Hutchins 1997, 2001 & 2002; Alice Springs 2003 & 2006; Tidal City of Devonport 2006. Represented in Tasmanian public gallery collections.
Peter POULET
Painter
Peter Poulet’s abstract paintings use colour, fluidity of line, and the juxtaposition of forms to create new environments. His work is influenced by nature and natural phenomenon – light, air, the feeling of space, enclosure and human interaction with nature – giving his art an organic sentiment. His body of work has evolved to explore more complex relationships between objects and forms as he brings in more from the outside world into his pieces. Introduced elements reflect his ideas about the world and include thoughts that were present from the earliest works, thus maintaining continuity of influence and motivation – nature and expression of his feelings and emotions. This awareness of nature is also crucial to his architecture and his interest in sustainability.
Peter Poulet holds numerous awards and appointments across art and architecture. Poulet was honoured as Artist in Residence at Bundanon in 1999 and at the New England Regional Art Museum in 2002. His work is held in the collections of the major law firms Allen Arthur Robinson and Baker & McKenzie, and also in the University of New South Wales, Artbank, the Manly Hydraulics Laboratory, and the Bundanon Trust.
Maeve WOODS
Painter
“I imagined flight, tumbling, echoes, viscosity, layering and glimpses into other dimensions. My interest in the colour informs all the works and their titles. Hidden on the reverse side of the support, a frame gives strength but does not conceal the wild paper’s ragged edges. As the painting is slightly raised in advance of the wall, a shadow is cast and this peripheral fact can interact with after-images and other ephemera evoked by the paintings.” -Maeve Woods, 2013
“We have become so accustomed in contemporary media to seeing the world through screens. In recent years the ratio of these ubiquitous screens has become wider, more landscape in orientation. These works serve to remind us that painting is not simply a medium through which we see the world, it involves the creation of a physical object. Through their insistence on a vertical orientation Maeve Woods’ paintings resist both framing and being framed, instead they stand upright, like trees.” – Steven Ball
JAMIN
A Life Mediated (A life lived)
Oh to be like a bird, eating the berry, catching the wind and doing other bird like things. Or like a rock, ponderously witnessing such ancient and slow accretion and dissolution – unconcerned, apparently, by the immediate nature of my rockishness or after-rockishness or before-rockishness. Instead I cling like a many-headed-leech to a multiplicity of filters, mirrors, constructs and contraptions; shaping and shaped – mediated – by the blood-flow of fashionable consumption. My thoughts and desires are disingenuous, and yet I struggle to place where it is they originate from and why I am left with a residual feeling of futility. My identity is not some essential thing. My fingerprints remain a point of continuity but their surrounding flesh has changed, aged, calcified. I guess in a certain kind of modality I am human – like that Verve song – yet I’m told that on a sub-atomic level I’m not that different to the bird or the rock. My other experiences and perceptions of self seem contiguous, linked, to some other mutable thing – a book, a person, a word, an event – seemingly fixed but itself in a state flux , contingent to yet more things enfolded within elaborate mesh works. For instance, I often find a song to be compelling, so I press a button that deletes money – which only existed as a virtual contingent – from my bank account, of no fixed location. That virtual currency is then distributed amongst a collection of interested parties that probably had something to do with making the music. Probably. It is a tiny step in a colossal process that gathers, mines, produces, destroys, builds, empties and fills my desire. Seemingly instantly. In my cynical acknowledgement of this process – I only introduce yet more fashionable consumptions into the flow. Each time I attempt to ‘choose’ a different option – I am left poorer, further indebted and indentured to the culture-society-food-and-house-making-system I live in. Either that, or something new has arisen from the meshwork to assuage my thirst. A book about assemblage theory. A yoga class. A new movement. Some strings for my guitar so that I can write songs critiquing my indentured subscription to life-as-I-know-it. So then what? Well, for a brief moment – a mask slips, or a filter tears – and I glimpse into a void, an emptiness that is pregnant with possibility. It’s very brief. The filter stitches itself back together like a Mk2 Terminator or a granny on steroids, and what was void becomes mirror. I see myself in the round and am left with a feeling, in no uncertain terms, that the life-mediated, is all that’s left of me.
Jamin, 2015
Benjamin Kluss is a PhD Candidate at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania, who produces visual art under the moniker Jamin and music as Vibrant Matters.
