Confluent decay responds to the contradictions and dystopian fears that underlie the optimism of the Post-internet age. Craig O’Shanesy is an oil painter who merges ‘real world’ personal landscapes and portraits with the ‘collective database’ of imagery experienced by delving into the virtual. Fiction, memory, reality and history are suspended in painterly gestures of varying transparency to form emotive spatial constructions. By suggesting a fractured and hybrid narrative between these different sources of experience these paintings serve to disrupt ideas of control, order, categorization and purity. They offer a meditation on the tension or ambience that can exist between a confluence of multiple sources of experience.
Gallery 61: Queensland Academies, Creative Industries Campus, 61 Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059.
Image: CRAIG O’SHANESY, Confluent Decay, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 137 x 200 cm.
