 |
|
Russell G Shaw
See July 15-27 Exhibition at Satellite Gallery in Auckland
R.G.SHAW.
I live in hamilton where I completed
my studies in the early nineties within
the field of craft and design.
I then proceeded to take these skills
into the realm of fine art painting and
assemblage.
I work primarily in an Avant-Pop
expressionist style, using oil,acrylic,
collage, discarded objects,
assembledge and sound.
I show these works in the contextual
framework of the landscape tradition.
This later period of paintings involve a
heavier blend of image and text, notes
of and from a rapidly changing time
and place.
Psycho-geographies from the concious
and thinking
(head)-land.
NEW NEW ZEALAND.
2008
The visually poetic work of R.G Shaw consists of what he refers to as 'psycho-geographies'. Using, among other content, 'anatomies, geographies, quoted conversations and streamed and sampled broadcasts'* he contemplates the great philosophical questions often appropriating the trivial and common to do so.
Shaw incorporates symbolic imagery in his work, both painted and found, as visual stepping stones through literal and intellectual landscapes, commenting on the imagery and elevating it to represent key cultural reference points.
His appropriated reference points are meditated on and re-formed through his work which heavily references the tradition of New Zealand landscape painting. We are privy to his meditations on the psyche 'manifesting like so many islands" acting as "rafts constructed out of numerous ways of being'*.
*R.G Shaw
Outside Words
Shaw's work is like drowning in a sea of pop culture detritus. Gasping for some fresh, unsullied
air, and allbleary
eyed, you rise up and find mothers - like Mary and like Guinevere - reaching out to you, but you go down again. Shaw paints vast polluted seas, he dry brushes
mountains like cupping palms. His hills are women, but they are torn at by words crossing over
them at zany angles, and they are literally carved out by the survey man divvying up what is not
ours to own.
Galleys can be seen on horizons. Bodies wrestle in the foreground. This threshing about
in the waters of a disposable culture can suffocate and Shaw, on occasion, rewards us with a nearnude
canvas draped in overwatered
acrylics. It's a necessary moment of repose for the eye and
the mind. You must take up his work in this way; it does not invite participation, it requires it.
He eschews the sort of afterthought art that stings only on reflection. Instead, he creates
mass tangles of earnestly overthought
bodies and words. His decision is to care. His work is
meaningfull
and honest. It lacks the glossedup
veneer of ad agency irony. In this way, Shaw's work is an abrasion to the skin. Possibly, it nicks at our bones. His paintings are visceral and
unrelenting. Travelling the lines of his words and his meaning is exhausting. You can't keep up.
While these places he goes may be 'other,' they -of necessity - are of no other but what is
inside minds and outside of our words. He exposes his thoughts, and shows us together at sea and
all awash with the shallow superfluity of a culture that consumes constantly and hungrily, but
never with relish.
J.Boyd
Director
Ariki Gallery,
Hamilton.
|
