Gene Richards
Normanhurst Boys High School
STILL ESCAPING LIFE, STILL KILLING TIME ...
Printmaking
Linoleum Print on Newspaper
As we mature and our entertainment preferences change, we find different escape mechanisms to remain ignorant of world events. Initially my body of work explores the toys which keep us blind, in the great blissful ignorance of childhood, to the great suffering and generational gap around us. These ways of killing time follow us into the sophistication of video games which, through various consoles, hold us to a continued deterioration of our health. Finally, this escapism matures and our identity is developed past our cultural heritage through an exploration of the medium of music, enjoying the personal expression it offers.
My artmaking practice has been influenced by the study and interpretation of the following artists: Ricky Swallow, Rich Werner, Toru Iwatani, Charli XCX, Virgil Abloh, Peter Saville, KISS.
Marker's Commentary
Still escaping life, still killing time … borrows from traditions of Dutch still life masters to comment on the duality of living in a contemporary world through a personal vision. The meticulously executed large scale lino relief prints demonstrate a mastery of technique to delineate forms and depict an arrangement of objects which pay tribute to the balanced compositions, limited palette and clear directional light of the Dutch painting tradition. Each printed image suspends the audience's attention in a veil of familiar objects cleverly executed and drawn from contemporary pop culture and gaming genres, from within the student’s world.
Conceptual layering elaborates through the deliberate compositional choice of overprinting the still life imagery on a series of newspaper tabloid pages to create a complex dialogue. The photographic imagery and headlines sensationalising world events penetrate through the floating image to disrupt the psychological otherness created by the relief image. This forces the audience to poignantly linger between two worlds and question the futility of pastimes such as music and gaming, as a form of escapism to mask the gravitas of current world events.