Artist – David M. Thomas
I have exhibited my work for a quarter of a century. I have seen the idea of art change a lot in this time. This exhibition will map the shifts in my attitudes along the way. For me the job title “Artist” was a synonym for freedom…now it would seem one is only free to justify one’s activity through other more legitimate pursuits, such as artist as activist; artist as academic; artist as researcher; artist as scientist and so on. If I were to legitimise my work through another process exterior to the purely aesthetic formal concerns of making art, it is the artist as comic, minstrel philosopher… essentially a clown.
Towards this end, this exhibition and all my work to this date seeks to create ideological collisions between disparate cultural elements and forms from late capitalism. These collages reference far ranging content and attitudes from the Situationists Internationale to the three minute pop song.
The Walls Miami on the Gold Coast is the perfect place for this exhibition, as it is in places like this that Capitalism enacts its own end. A kind of finitude with attitude if you like. The heroic and often humorous denial of this end is the feeling I hope to express.
The exhibition will comprise new and old video, sculpture, pop songs, performance and two dimensional works. Important ways of working involve inter-subjective processes such as interviews, dialogues and collaborations, the installation of this work was acheived with the help of Erika Scott and Benjamin Crowley.
I have exhibited my work since 1990 and was active in organising several artist projects in Sydney most notably CBD Gallery between 1993-2000. Recently, I have exhibited work at the National Portrait Gallery, Peloton, Monash Gallery, Queensland College of Art Gallery and GOMA. I have curated the exhibitions, Blow Up the Inside World at the University Art Museum at Queensland University, Post Contemporary Painting for the Institute of Modern Art and Personal Other World, for Canberra Contemporary Art Space. I am currently the lead guitarist in the band ∑GG√EIN and and founding member and arranger for Electronic group Weekend Immendorff.
The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.
David M. Thomas, 2016
>Closing event and artist talk Sunday afternoon 14 August, 3-5pm
>Followed by BANANA SUNDAY [same day] featuring David M. Thomas’ sound experiments WEEKEND IMMENDORFF and ∑GG√EIN, 5-7pm
>Eats and treats all arvo from local food truck SURF BURGER
