Artists
DAVID ATTWOOD
SHANNON FIELD
AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSON
Ken Urban
Date: 24-Jul-2015 – 23-Aug-2015
Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania
Rhyming slang for suburban or the brother of Keith Urban? Contemporary Art Tasmania presents the work of three early-career artists under the deliberately ambiguous title of Ken Urban. David Attwood, Shannon Field and Amber Koroluk-Stephenson each have a fascination with the paradoxical reverberations beneath the surface of suburban Australia.
David Attwood appropriates the qualities of common and well-known Australian sayings such as ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ or ‘weak as cats piss’ in developing his more up-to-date series of text based simile works. Serious and sincere while at the same time absurd and playful, Attwood’s work will bring a smile to your face while you squirm in your boots.
Convicts of the Apocalypse is a new installation by Shannon Field inspired by the Tasmanian landscape, convict history and contemporary masculinity. Field combines monstrous grotesque with humour in his seven simplified wooden figures atop workshop supports commonly known as ‘horses’.
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson works through ideas of utopia, the suburban façade and the relationship between natural and man-made environments within her large-scale paintings. Shifting pictorial planes and over saturated colours are combined within idealised scenes that are at once familiar and obscure.
This exhibition is supported by commissioned texts on each of the artists work: David Attwood – Rob O’Connor, Shannon Field – Lisa Campbell-Smith, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson – Geoff Parr.