Artists

TOM O’HERN

BEC STEVENS

JACOB LEARY

Date: 15-Aug-2009 – 06-Sep-2009

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

3 into 1 is an annual exhibition format in which three early career artists present independent solo exhibitions of new work simultaneously in CAST Gallery.

In 2009 CAST is proud to present three artists investigating systems, patterns or acts of colonisation:

JACOB LEARY – PROCESSING HYPERTELIA (EARLY STAGES)

Leary’s sculptural installations and digital animations are driven by strictly ordered systems which expand vigorously and organically, reflecting the kind of exponential growth indicative of contemporary technological progression. His use of bright, ordinary objects like plastic cups, playing cards and bus tickets initially connote child’s play, but reveal in their repetition a more political narrative about the specialisation of knowledge, and a loss of control in which individuals become mere “specimens under the command of scientific, financial and medical modeling”.

TOM O’HERN – PEACE AND PROSPERITY

Peace and Prosperity is an intentionally ironic title for this body of work reflecting O’Hern’s ambivalent personal experiences of masculinity in the context of Australian suburbia. These images, painted and hand-drawn, celebrate the everyday abject with boyish humour and irreverence, and are loaded with explosive, graphic aggression. O’Hern’s visually powerful works are taut with frustrations: historical, sexual, cultural, generational and personal.

BEC STEVENS – VIGOROUS EVERFROST

In an installation combining photographic and sculptural elements, Stevens examines the constructs – conceptual, linguistic, physical etc – that typify the city-dweller’s experience of ‘Nature’. The urban weed infestations that she documents result from human interventions into site; anthropocentric actions which create the artificial conditions for unnatural patterns of organic growth. In this work, the particular hue of fluorescent green spray-paint used to mark land on construction sites acts as a garish symbolic marker for the abstraction and subversion of Nature under the influences of Culture.