westspace5

West space

SIMON MacEWAN | NICK WADDELL | MILA FARAVON

23 July – 14 August 2010

Opening: Thursday 22 July 2010, 6-8pm

Simon MacEwan
The Devil’s Mountain

The Devil’s Mountain is an exhibition of sculptures and watercolour drawings exploring early mathematic ideas used to order and explain the physical world and to justify architectural systems; ideal transcendental abstractions such as the Platonic solids and Vitruvian and Modulor man. The exhibition looks at the relationship and tensions between these abstract systems and the chaotic reality of the world, considering their alteration and failure in their physical manifestations and the more subtle ways in which they distort the world.
 
Simon MacEwan is an artist who works across a range of media from drawing and animation, to sculpture, jewellery, and the making of useless machines.

Nick Waddell
own- GOAL!!!!

own- GOAL!!!!  is an exhibition in two parts.
 
Taking it one artwork at a time, own- GOAL!!!! is a trophy room of achievement, borrowing from the secular and non-secular world.
 
It is a ‘personal best’ exhibition for Nick Waddell whose training and intensity have resulted in big on-ground rewards.
 
It is about triumph over adversity, and going hard at the art.
 
It is about having a RED HOT GO!
 
How do contemporary artists make visual art in a world where we are saturated by images? Nick Waddell graduated from the VCA drawing department in 2009, when he was also awarded the Orloff Family award, the Alliance Française award and the John Vickory scholarship. He regularly exhibits nationally and internationally, recently exhibiting at The Division of Human Works in Brooklyn and the 2009 Blake Prize Director’s Cut.

Mila Faranov
Nepenthecae

Nepenthes or Pitcher Plants are meat-eating plants, but they are also exquisitely beautiful. Filled with sticky liquid, they seduce their prey and then, slowly consume it. There is a beautiful yet abject nature to this plant, with all its metaphorical implications.
 
Watercolour is a primary medium in this work, making a stain on paper that, whilst recreating the fantastical patterns and colours of the plant, also heightens its visceral and fleshy textures. The gallery will be transformed into a hothouse diorama with its various metaphors of propagation, cultivation, the rarefied and the hybrid. My aim is to create something at once beautiful yet undeniably creepy and grotesque. Something at once static yet alive and possibly even a threat.

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