A selection of fresh work from new and existing Boom artists, showcasing current creative practices. This exhibition features paintings by Ren Inei, Shane Drinkwater, Mickey Egan, Skye Jeffreys and Louise Tate. Skye Jeffreys Skye Jefferys is a visual artist based in Singapore. She holds a Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication from Monash University and began a Graduate Certificate in Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She committed to her artistic practice long before her first solo show in 2013 at the Canberra Contemporary Artspace in Australia and has subsequently exhibited in Sydney and Melbourne. Skye is drawn to the concept of limitations, whether real or imagined, and how we respond to these. Her vivid paintings are tumultuous – perhaps joyful, perhaps chaotic, or caught in a dance that swings between the two. Saturated with colour and robust with paint, the works would seem dense but for a gestural dynamism that defies the ground and implies a shimmering limitlessness. Representation isn’t missed and can’t be found, despite the occasional unfurling of a line that teases with suggestion of form. Instead it reveals the quiet pleasure of mark-making – the sumptuousness of paint under brush; The tremble and slip, the dabbing and sploshing, the wandering sweeps. Pure painting, straight up. “I aim to create paintings that might breathe beyond the works’ boundaries. Where it is frameless, edgeless, limitless. This is achieved by working primarily on un-stretched canvas on the floor, continuously moving around and around as the work unfurls and takes on a life of its own. Base layers are loaded with paint, and done so vigorously, but there is no sense of top or bottom. The surface is slowly built upon so that some layers remain visible, others are hidden. Artistically, my concern is to create beauty, energy and vitality through a deeply expressionistic process that transcends any sense of place, time and space and evokes an emotional response in the viewer.” Louise Tate Louise is a Melbourne based artist originally from the beautiful green hills of the Byron Shire. Louise works predominantly in painting and is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at RMIT University. “My current work draws from old family photographs and sourced images to create layered works that comment on the passing of time. The paintings are slowly built up through a layering of transparent washes of colour and textural mark making. There is an aspect of incompletion that enables them to hover between representation and abstraction. Through my work I aim to investigate the medium of painting as producing its own meaning and eschewing the constraints of linear time. Source photographs from both personal and public archives are used to construct potentially fictional (yet equally real) histories or narratives within works that are not anchored in either past or present, but exist rather in a durational state of flux. My paintings draw inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, Modernist literature such as In Search of Lost Time by Proust, and contemporary female painters Mamma Andersson and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.” Shane Drinkwater Tasmanian born artist Shane Drinkwater has exhibited widely within Australia and overseas. He studied at the University of Tasmania, School of Art in Hobart and the National Art School in Sydney. Shane has lived in Queensland since 1994, after time spent in Paris: as recipient of the Alliance Française/Australia council fellowship he had access to studio space near the Bastille for 4 months in 1988. He stayed on another 6 years. When talking about what painting means to him, Drinkwater states: “Painting is something I’ve always needed to do and I’m enjoying it more and more: it’s the joy of putting colour ,shape and gesture on a surface. I’m interested in the making! I delve into the act of painting with a minimum repertoire of visual elements aiming for a maximum visual intensity. Ideas and images appear through the making of the work, language becomes unnecessary, I let the work speak for me.” “My work for this exhibition reflects a recurrent process in my work: a composition of circles, lines, dashes, using repetition to create patterns.” Mickey Egan Mickey has created a new series of paintings for Current, looking at Lakes Craters & Plains: A non linear view of the Western District of Victoria. “We live in an increasingly fragmented and non linear time line. A time that is bombarded with constant layers of informational threads, images and noise. There is more differentiation and much less singular notions of story telling, image making, or the truth. We occupy a time whereby the participation and quantity of image making has never been like this in the history of human kind. This “hyper-modern” world has forced a new condition or status quo for narrative and ways of seeing the world or landscape. Grand landscapes or still vistas with clear horizons that are ornately framed are a thing of the past, simile are those story’s that have a defined beginning, middle and ending. We consume and absorb stuff in a polyphonic way, there is not one voice, one narrative, one picture, one beginning, one ending or one defined answer to how we see things.” “These paintings use traditional mediums that attempt to reflect notions of broken, fragmented or no linear perspectives of the local landscape of the Western District. They are informed by the ancient geology & colonial past, yet they represent the post colonial /hyper modern present.” Mickey Egan lives on the Surf Coast with his family. He is an apparel designer that presently works in Geelong. He has worked for major brands both in Australia & the USA. His work & lifestlye has led him travel frequently and extensively which has further enabled him to access his interests; cities, art museums, galleries, cultural events, historic sites, surfing locations & the great outdoors. Ren Inei Boom’s Gallery Director and local artist Ren Inei has created two new paintings for Current which explore the relationship between sea and sky. “The horizon line exists across the water. A space at the end of the visible, dividing the inky depths which dwell below and the openness of the unknown above.” Ren Inei is a painter, he is also one half of the team behind Boom Gallery, curating and hanging the exhibitions and liaising with the many artists who show at Boom. Ren completed studies at Deakin University in the early 1990’s and has sustained a consistent art practice since, participating in many exhibitions (both group and solo). Current runs from 14 July – 6 August. To see a full listing of the exhibition click here.
