22 March – 26 April 2024
Despard is pleased to share our second DG Online exhibition featuring paintings by early career Tasmanian artist, Sam Field. After engaging audiences at the Melbourne Art Fair in February, we are excited to share a selection of key works from The Back Of My Own Head.
Within this poignant suite of paintings, Field explores the many bizarre and often questionable events and characters steering today’s social trajectory. With a bold aesthetic that is distinctively vibrant and restless, Field’s new body of work maps a growing sense of global and domestic uncertainty. Strewn with religious symbology and mythological icons, Field describes a world seemingly hypnotised by religious fanaticism, ultra-capitalism and conspiracy theories.
These paintings are not didactic but ask questions like when does a hill become a mountain? what is the difference between a sauce and a condiment? What if we are actually an AI Simu-lation? or what if the earth is neither flat nor round but a coil like a roll of 35 mm film, and each negative is the entirety of an individual reality repeated in myriad ways? Or what if infinity doesn’t actually exist, and when you get to the end you end up back at the beginning, alone, staring at the back of your own head?
Click here to request a catalogue for Sam Field.
Sam Field is an early career artist based in Marion Bay, Tasmania. Field completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 2016. During the early stages of his career Field worked and painted alongside contemporary artist Luke Sciberras. Field was a finalist in The Hadley’s Art Prize 2018 and the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2019, winning the Contemporary Arts Tasmania prize in 2016. Field has exhibited nationally and is held in private collections across Australia, the USA and Europe.
Click here to request virtual viewing room catalogue for Sam Field.