Dane Lovett

New Romance: Painting, video, photography Helen Gory Galerie June 5 - July 5, 2008 Six artists working in 5 cities over three continents have been hand-picked for HGG's 2008 bi-annual group exhibition. The show provides a portal into the current contemporary art scene, showcasing exceptional practices across a range of mediums including painting, drawing, photography and video. Particularly exciting is that all but one of the selected artists are showing at HGG for the first time although their work has already been recognised through a slew of scholarships, grants and awards both in Australia and abroad. Santina Amato's unique, one-off sculptural video installations have been applauded for their combination of skill, sophistication and humour. In her work Amato gives free reign to her optimism and wide-eyed anticipation about the world, playing out her unabashed wish for wondrous experiences such as swinging on an invisible swing and walking on a giant pink marshmallow bare foot. Accolades for Brisbane artist Dane Lovett's paintings range from winning the Qantas Spirit of Youth Award and being a finalist in the Metro 5 Art Award and the ABN Amro Emerging Art Prize to doing the artwork for an Eskimo Joe album. An astute observer and social commentator, Lovett documents visual stimuli in his urban environment with a confident, economical style that is at once intuitive and systematic. His considered approach to light and form combined with a confident control of space and place elevates the ordinary to extraordinary. Drawing is German artist Stefan Marx's favourite thing to do. His astonishing watercolours on paper are a visual diary that takes us into the creative mind of Marx, for whom thinking, working, living and drawing are inextricable. Lauded for their sophisticated colouration and powerful imagery, these personal streams of consciousness traverse subjects ranging from quirky characters to romantic landscapes and raves. Marx enjoys iconic status in his native Germany both for his art as well as for his successful collaboration with a number of skateboard companies and his 'Lousy Livin' limited edition t-shirt company. Laith McGregor's paintings explore his fascination with the unconscious state of mind. Whimsical apparitions give visual expression to McGregor's unfettered thoughts and dreams in works that blur the boundaries between memory, imagination and self-portraiture. Vivid juxtapositions characterise McGregor's work - between light and dark; between dense cover and visible erasure - giving stylistic form to the multifarious and often antithetical facets of human experience. The haunting photographs of Gretchen Mercedes transport the viewer not to a fixed destination but to a mobile point of departure from which a number of escapes can be made. With a clear and commanding aesthetic voice, Mercedes captures marginal spaces producing images that are at once arresting in their beauty and unsettling in their silence. Mentored by Bill Henson, San Diego based Mercedes is currently completing her Masters under a scholarship at the University of California. LA based artist and designer Shannon Peel's skull paintings hint at Peel's past as a notorious and applauded Sydney graffiti artist. These intimate works are painted with extraordinary detail on vintage book covers. Although seamlessly navigating a transition to fine art, Peel has retained the strong, graphic visual vocabulary and hardened, bold design aesthetic that made him a worldwide name in street art. Uniting the artists' diverse practices is a shared commitment to capturing the grace of seemingly ordinary objects and experiences and a recognition of the dignity of dreams.

Exhibitions

New Romance - 2008

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