WHEN : 20th – 27th September / Opening 20th Sep, 6:00pm
WHERE : A-CH Gallery, 75 Vulture St, West End
Artists : Cameron Hawes, Robert Vagg & Glen Schenau.
Combinations of mundane objects observed in parts of fringe Australian subcultures have come to represent something of a continued fascination for Cameron Hawes. Hawes’s drawings illustrate moments from seemingly banal Australian suburban life, sometimes with references to a darker underside, which he has come to be reluctantly acquainted with. The drawings themselves, however, are set within borders and boundaries of satisfying textures and tones. It’s hard to decide whether the works are pleasing or distressing, but a certain combination of the both seems to make them uniquely captivating.
Robert Vagg’s work is a proliferation of emotion. You can get caught by the gaze of his portraits that are able to cause pangs of emotions to stir in your stomach, which had until now remained implicit. While each portrait’s pang differs from another’s – some give off a sense of melancholy, others loneliness, paranoia or isolation. It’s difficult not to wonder if the responses these portraits provoke come from Vagg’s subconscious as the artist, or are somewhat reflective of our own as spectators.
There’s a humour in the work of Glen Schenau, but also a bluntness in his representation of reality, which one might find rather sad or perhaps confronting. The bare and honest paper or kerbside scraps that hold together Schenau’s intuitive markings are stained over time by their artless existence – not a tinge intended, but simply a canvas in a living state. Like the fingers that drew them, grubby yet virtuous, each piece is a primitive and sometimes emotional expression of person, movement, or human motion over time. An obscured representation but a truthful one; It is the way it is.
