Peter Alwast is one of Australia’s more sophisticated artists, but you would not know it at first glance! His paintings look half-finished, raw pine struts prop up video projections of mundane events, and amateurish drawings hang on DIY plastic sheets. His stuff seems to come straight out of the official neo-slacker handbook, and his anti-aesthetic, non-committal works should exclude his work from international biennials that go for art brands with glossy production values. Alwast’s art runs against the grain because it is understated and conceptual, and it is the process, not the product that mostly interests him. Instead of presenting slick aesthetic packages he is a scavenger who combines imagery in a ‘post-production’ way. There is no consistent theory or style to his work because he likes to play with the sensibility of construction and the ways in which art can set off meanings.
Since returning from a stint at Parsons College in New York City (courtesy of a Samstag Scholarship and under the tutelage of Richard Tuttle), Alwast has been involved in a number of shows, including Working Like a Tiger (2003) at the Farm, Brisbane; ‘Prime 2005’ at the Queensland Art Gallery; and Delivery (2005) at Metro Arts, Brisbane. These exhibitions provide a useful coverage of Alwast’s post-medium approach and his experiments with a broad range of themes. Whether using painting or material ensembles in installation pieces, he approaches all of his art in the same way—as a configuration or a set of parameters that generates an endless cycle of possible formulations. This means that the exhibited work is never fully resolved or ‘finished’, for he believes that art and its reception are necessarily a contingent state... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline