From Andrew Frost…
Since co-founding Das Superpaper Nick Garner has been busy – from editing and distributing the physical paper, to managing the web version, not to mention all the ‘added value’ context of video interviews with artists, he seemingly does it all. Well, not quite. Making a return to exhibiting with The Night Sky, Garner’s art making has a decidedly conceptual bent, making paintings that, he claims, are silhouettes of paintings in the Art Gallery of NSW’s collection of modern western paintings that “…are stacked against the wall, the public invited to take a painting, night turns to day.”
Based on the processes of “dissemination and disintegration” Garner’s work plays on a familiarity with the AGNSW’s collection, or more precisely, the idea of that collection. Confronted with a black monochrome the viewer projects the idea of a remembered work into the frame, a process defeated by the absolute blackness of what may as well be the night sky, the idea disintegrated by the physical presence of the unseen. As the exhibition unwinds as visitors remove works, we reasonably ask, what are we looking at here? Probably nothing, but also everything.
Until March 15
Kudos Gallery, Paddington
Pic: Nick Garner, The Night Sky, 2014.
