Flinders Lane Gallery is currently presenting the work of Richard Blackwell.
Blackwell, an emerging talent from Canberra, continues his fascination with real and virtual boundaries for Grotto volume 3, following his solo shows in Canberra (Grotto volume 1) and Chicago (Grotto volume 2). Blackwell employs veneers, digital projections and aluminium printing techniques to play with ideas of spatial distortion, inspired by architectural forms and landscapes. Illusionary tropes transform accepted constraints between interior and exterior to create new readings of accessible and impenetrable space.
“Grotto” is a word that conjures up dark spaces that are mysterious and dripping with stalactite like forms. The Latin grupta means crypt and suggests an underworld. The creation of artificial grottoes in Italian and French gardens was fashionable in the mid 16th C. The outside of these grottoes often appeared like an enormous rock or rustic porch and inside might be temples, fountains, stalactites or imitation gems. According to Patsy Payne, Richard’s grotto is a fabrication, his caves and asteroids refer to material in the world whilst steadfastly remaining in the virtual world and really only able to enter our space on the surface of materials that are thin and flat: MDF, veneers, digital projections or paper. What size are these structures? Are they minute or giant; in the digital realm scale is arbitrary. Richard’ structures and shapes are visually compelling, geological yet strongly abstract, physically present yet illusory.
 | |
| Faultline |
 | |
| Flood |
 | ||
| Supermolet |
No comments:
Post a Comment