The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Dominating Scott Avery's recent exhibition at Savode was a reckless mixing of styles, techniques, images, messages and materials. This gave the show vitality and interest but tended to overload and fragment it as a whole. Political works, intense psychological works, and quieter, more poetic and abstract pieces all competed for attention.
Amongst large canvasses with heavily worked or busily marked surfaces, were three Billboard Maquettes which directly criticised common cultural representations of art, aggression, and success. In these works Avery overlayed images with text lifted from popular culture sources. In Billboard Maquette-Ann Street, Fortitude Valley, a man carrying a surf-board, presented in simple outline, walks casually across an image of heaving, uplifted torsos and faces with expressions of agony/ecstasy reminiscent of the emotional excesses of t 9th Century Romanticism. Text appropriated from a beer advertisement gives the painting its final punch and directs the viewer to ask the questions: How do we measure success, by what criteria? Avery clearly points the finger at the way these and other criteria are constructed by the image and slogan-making media.
However, under this layer of direct political content lies a more personal level of meaning, a search for psychological communion, which I feel is at the heart of Avery's work. Images, words and matter are appropriated, layered, recycled and concealed, then worked over and through to reveal fragments, little secrets from deep within, symbols and meanings which coalesce and disintegrate.
Avery's juxtapositions were sometimes stark. The work Unfilled displayed, on the same canvas, a realistically portrayed figure on a bed in black and white, next to an abstract panel comprising one pure blue square and a white section with blobs of colour revealed