Culture

With cascading light dancing into the space, a series of paintings with slices of glitter and flamboyantly coloured paint radiate across the desolate gallery floor. Simon Attwool is a graduate of the Dunedin School of Art and is currently based in Melbourne. Not Afraid features eight paintings and an untitled inflatable sculpture that curls around a corner into the centre of the gallery floor.
The inflatable sculpture is a floor work in which a cast of the artist's face appears to float amongst a cluster of plastic clouds stained with fragments of white paint. It seems to be a self-portrait; when it inflates, the artist’s face suffocates around the plastic clouds. The process of creation is prevalent throughout each energetic and chaotic assemblage.
 
Shot in the park (Cop 'R' Tops) Part A is a painting with a screen-printed image of a female policewoman submerged in aphoristically and aggressively applied paint in a range of bold colours, with flicks of metallic glitter reflecting out of the picture plain. Appearing more like a collage than a painting, it correlates with another painting in the exhibition Shot in the park (Cops 'R' Tops) Part B. The series is a response to the recent shooting of an eleven-year old boy in Melbourne, at the hands of four policemen.
 
Attwool uses a selection of familiar materials to explore how we digest contemporary culture. The collages both engage the viewer's roving eye and consume the gallery space. Each work is marked by a sense of chaotic ambiguity, with repeated themes resonating throughout, such as triangles, American iconography (for example, money and past presidents) and a strong use of piles of glitter. The use of familiar images from contemporary culture creates a strange and dislocated space.
 
Some psychic meandering presents the triangular all seeing eye, with which Attwool seems to be referencing Freemasonry, with a human figure visible beneath the array of heavy paint and screen-printed imagery. The organised mess of each work makes it difficult for the viewer to focus on one specific point within, with the titles also scrawled on the bottom of each work, in a manner similar to that of Dunedin painter Phillip James Frost.