I am a Force of the Past 2015, Bitumen, synthetic polymer paint and graphite on paper. Wire, found materials, synthetic polymer paint on plaster with granite rock.
My Love Lies Only in Tradition 2015, Bitumen, synthetic polymer paint and graphite on paper. Wire, found materials, synthetic polymer paint on plaster with granite rock.
I come from the ruins, the churches, 2015, Bitumen, synthetic polymer paint and graphite on paper. Wire, found materials, synthetic polymer paint on plaster with granite rock.
The altarpieces, the villages abandoned 2015, Bitumen, synthetic polymer paint and graphite on paper. Wire, found materials, synthetic polymer paint on plaster with granite rock.
These horrible rocks, 2015, Bitumen, synthetic polymer paint and graphite on paper. Wire, found materials, synthetic polymer paint on plaster with granite rock.
Film Still from 'Mamma Roma' Italy, 1962, 106 minutes Black & White, 1.85:1, Italian
Mamma Roma, Theatrical Release poster, (Cineriz, 1962)
New Age Totems
2015
Bus Projects Collingwood, Victoria
‘Baby sometimes I don't understand you
But you're the abstract art in my modern museum
And baby sometimes we fall apart
But the ruins of my heart stands like a coliseum’
Molly Nilsson, “I Hope You Die”
New Age Totems is a series of works concerned with the mythology behind symbolic imagery. Drawings and sculptures have been assembled from an archive of historical images in which shapes and forms mark a system of signs that denote the ruinous object. When the physicality of a structure becomes ruinous it elicits a shrine-like mythology (the pyramids of Egypt, Avebury, Pompeii) and the semiology behind such megaliths increases in desirability. The works in New Age Totems are somewhat redolent to relics; etched with motifs, in varying shades of obsidian, they are not dissimilar to the markings and patterning on a monument or tomb.
New Age Totems are a visual reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Force of the Past’ 1962, written during the making of his seminal film ‘Mamma Roma’; as the language of symbols itself becomes a ruin, the object it is signifying does the same.
The works in this series are detached mediations of forms that are represented in a recognisable image but refrain from a recognisable discourse, becoming ruins of their previous incarnations.
Is this a funerial disease? The cacophony of monuments to statues, tombs, openings, punctum’s and trophies, are symbols of remembrance; yet refuse to define their original meaning.
Through the myth of the windowpane, as image, there is much more to hide as the scene is observed in numerous panels.
The mythology of the window lends us an alternate view of both the interior and exterior differing only in location. Architecturally the window morphs its shape based on design. The interior and exterior view through the window can never be replicated in any location, the myth remains with the viewer and how they choose to experience it.
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Appennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilight, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, for the privilege
of recording them from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a foetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962