16 October – 9 November 2024
OPENING EVENT – Friday 18 October from 5:30pm. Guest Speaker – Visual Artist and Educator, Raymond Arnold.
Despard Gallery is proud to host the inaugural solo exhibition by emerging Tasmanian artist George Kennedy.
In the new major body of paintings, Kennedy furthers his exploration into the fringe areas of the Tasmanian landscape, where the expansion of urbanisation encroaches on natural spaces. Through paint Kennedy captures the entanglement between the growing density of suburban housing around Rokeby, Tasmania and the surround bush land, drawn to the fragile and often chaotic boundaries where the manmade and organic converge. Through energetic lines and bold colour, Kennedy interprets these marginal spaces, using images of abandoned vehicles and stacked houses as a metaphor for social precarity and rapid urban development. Through an anxious blend of abstraction and figuration, each composition visualises the restless temperament of contemporary suburbia, capturing the growing socio-economic divide and fragility of community cohesion which underpins much of suburban Australia.
At the heart of Kennedy’s practice is an intuitive approach, developing a visual language that evokes a sense of transition, where moments of familiarity and structure begin to decline into states of disruption and decay.
Click here to register your interest for George Kennedy.
