Sebastian Moody is an artist known for creating some of Brisbane’s most memorable public artworks using text. His works, KEEP THE SUNSHINE at the Brisbane International Airport and THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT THE BIGGER IT GETS in the McLachlan Street underpass in Fortitude Valley, have become part of our city’s icons.
Pause is an exhibition of black and white text-based artwork panels launching at Onespace in West End on 7 August, which showcases Moody’s latest suite of language-driven gallery artworks. These new pieces continue in the art history traditions of 1960’s conceptual art and ‘concrete poetry’.
Pause also builds upon Moody’s 2019 projection artwork, Seeing, which was the inaugural Arts Queensland funded artwork commission for the ‘Belltower’ at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Moody’s artworks expand on our relationship with language and how it is perceived, drawing on the connotations of specific words when they are placed in certain arrangements and configurations as a painting. He seeks to incite initial reactions, confound our comparisons and effect our understandings when his chosen words are accompanied by another.
When these words are translated onto board with paint, they become object-like and gain a sense of materiality. Are they paintings, poems, signs, or all of these things? Taking the fast-paced nature of writing, reading and seeing into account — Moody asks us to take a pause, and draw attention to our own constructed thought processes. He offers no conclusions and invites us to make sense of the words that we see in front of us.
Click to view the Catalogue Essay
Image: Sebastian Moody, OCCUPY SWEATY VOICES PRIMAL POLICE, 2020, From the series SEEING, Acrylic on board, 60.9 x 45 cm. Image: Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace Gallery.
