DOUG BARTLETT : Double Extra Super -
OPENING – 6pm FRIDAY 25 February 2011
Opened by Special Guest Matt Hoy
Exhibition runs through to March 10
These days everyone wants double everything and extra everything on super everything. Bigger cars, bigger TVs, Bigger coffees, bigger burgers, bigger houses, bigger toys, bigger egos, more coverage, more angles....well, you get the picture.
‘Doug Bartlett’ is a collaboration between artists Nick Morris and Dave Bowers. But is it Collaborative production, or collaborative consumption• Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before. Morris and Bowers have used a combination of sharing, bartering and annihilation to produce works that seem to visually demonstrate the pace and style with which we currently live.
Morris and Bowers throw enough colour and action into the works, to satisfy even the greediest 21st century consumer, but are they dredging up the trash and treasures that the insatiable population have already digested and discarded. Doug regurgitates the debris of 20th century pop culture and delivers it back in ferocious technicolour to an eager audience.
A combination of found imagery, silkscreen, photography, wild freehand and quotes from celebrities, B grade pulp media and even junk mail all go in to Doug Bartlett’s blender and come out as a pop art thick shake with meat. Finalists in the Doug Moran Painting Prize 2010, invited to illustrate the cover of the Hoodoo Gurus latest album, fresh from recent shows in France, New York and India, Doug is coming out swinging Double Extra Super.
The creative process is raw, free and unplanned. They slap down slabs of colour and layer images at random.
Much of the initial work doesn’t survive because the rule between the pair is: ‘Paint over anything, and the other one can’t protest’. Whole vistas appear and disappear. Hours of work are swept away with one sweep of a brush. This process of creation and elimination continues until they agree the painting is finished. This represents an exceptional way of working which, quite frankly, would be violently upsetting to the vast majority of working artists today.
The canvases are a free-flowing exchange of random images and themes using stencils, spray paint, silkscreen, acrylic, oil stick and collage. The subject matter is gleaned from popular culture, including quotes from spam, advertising and gossip magazines.
Bowers writes, “I’m mesmerized by what I call incidental urban micro landscapes. The patterns of road repairs. Chewing gum on the footpath. The machinery and byproducts of human endeavour. The unintentional poetry of everyday life”.
Morris explains “Our rule of painting over anything you want creates art with no boundaries, free from clinging and being too precious, the creative process is accelerated as we bounce off each other.”
This balance of chaos and control, careful creation and ruthless obliteration creates the tension that justifies Doug Bartlett’s irresistible appeal.
