From Andrew Frost…
There is something inescapably luxurious about Garth Knight‘s photomontages. Maybe it’s the gold and blacks and flashes of red and blue that remind the viewer of jewellery, maybe it’s the ability to consider nature as a guilt free and enthralling spectacle that makes the experience so rich, but either way the artist’s latest series of large scale images are undeniably attractive. Perhaps it’s this very idea that lies at the heart of Knight’s work: pollinators are that group of animals and insects that transfer the seed of procreation from one plant to another, a metaphor for Knight of love itself.
Knight creates images of insects using thousands of pictures of flowers that are then painstakingly assembled and composed on a computer.”The symbiotic relationship between the two, flowers and pollinators, make them almost one being, neither exist without the other, they are separate parts of the same organism” writes Knight of his subject. “They are one and the same, the need of one for the other to exist so great that they merge into one being.” This metaphor of unity plays across the series including a butterfly, moth, wasp and bee – and perhaps an unlikely ember of the group – a bat – built from flowers. “Flowers are luscious, erotic and sensual, but plants, being immobile, cannot contact each other physically,” says Knight. “Pollinators form this link between them, carrying messages of love and desire.”
Until December 21
.M Contemporary, Woollahra
Pic: Garth Knight, Butterfly from the series Pollinators, 2014. Type C print, 125x84cm.
