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woohoo. my party.
Image - Darryl Bowes, Incendiary (Postcards from Emerald City) 2009 digital print 1000cm x 700cm Courtesy of the artist.
STEEL CITY BOYS
MOP 2/39 ABERCROMBIE STREET SYDNEY
OPENING 2ND JULY
LUCAS GROGAN
LUKE THURGATE
DARRYL BOWES
Newcastle artists Darryl, Lucas and Luke are picking fights.
Their work is connected by a shared fascination for traditional and flawed notions of masculinity and patriotism. Steel City Boys present images which range from public spectacle to private pain. Their works position these artists as both incendiaries and voyeurs. Images are consciously provocative, investigating the political and social tension inherent in the Australian experience. All three artists deal with icons and stereotypes which are activated by implied or explicit moments of violence.
Thurgate uses pornography as a metaphor for real and feigned physical and emotional experience. His drawings stage a dialogue between violence and sex. The images are nostalgic and deliberately sentimental. Head injuries, burns and scars operate as signifiers of male intimacy. The works romanticise the parallel intensity of fighting and fucking.
Bowes takes the ocular experience of Sydney and reduces it to a picturesque twilight zone. We live in an Age of Terror defined by simplistic politics and ambiguous international paranoia. These are bad dreams that trouble our city fathers - the ironic burning of the Islamic inspired Sydney Opera House, or a car-bomb detonated on the northern approach to the Harbour Bridge. Here, our passivity and the relativity of our isolation and paranoia are simultaneously exploded as myth.
Lucas Grogan tells stories. His complex drawings conflate the everyday with myth, fact with fiction, the personal with the public. A conceptual cocktail of imagery that sometimes produces a Molotov. Employing scurrilous humour Grogan focuses on the points of contention and stress in Australian society. The intricate patterning of these works offers a delicate seduction which belies the uncomfortable and confronting nature of his cultural transgression.
3rd Island (you came in chains, we came in planes) 1600 x 1200cm
2nd Island(we grew here, you flew here) 1600 x 1200 cm
detail
detail
The Island. 1600 x 1200mm
Detail
detail
detail
Wedding gift for Adriana and Joel.
Ben Quilty opening at UQ Art Museum Brisbane.
I've been extremely busy.
www.saymyname2008.com
Working on a few things at once at the moment- three series going at once. Sweetheart Doilies, Black and Blue and Black Stump series.
this week has been incredibly busy.
SAY MY NAME 3rd year show opened.
BLACK WHITE opened at SOFA Gallery.
After Parties, bullshit artist talks and teaching. i'm exhausted.
Luke Thurgate Loves
Find out how much Luke Loves you.
Luke Thurgate
Loves
Lucas Grogan
21021
3123
435
78%
Thurgate came over and we drank red, white and beer.
Got myself one full plate.
This was the photo that preceeded my nut turning up on facebook.
This past year has been one amazing time after another. Some Hightlights
( HIHLIGHTS )
I've been going out too much. Too much fun. Lifes been too good.