The Slow Cancellation of the Future

Left:
This is our final century
2020-21
Coal, gesso, and varnish on canvas
83.5 x 182.5 cm

Centre:
The future is our home too
2021
Coal, gesso, and varnish on canvas
83.5 x 182.5 cm

Right:
Value, not worth
2021
coal, gesso, and varnish on canvas
83.5 x 182.5 cm

Installation documentation from ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’, Milani Gallery at the Spring Hill Reservoirs, Brisbane, 9 – 16 October 2021

In The Slow Cancellation of the Future coal dust, gesso, and varnish are used to render semi- abstracted landscapes. The work’s material, processual, and compositional tactics express an existential sense of climate anxiety; one amplified in an Australian context where coal has long been purported as the global driver of economic growth rather than of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Without a clear horizon, but bound by a restrictive white border, the works both resist and reward being read as a conceivable landscape. Attempts to find internal orientation in the picture plane leave the viewer adrift in an experiential mirror of our collective unknown future in this era of climate crisis.

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