Suburban Musings and Other Curious Finds is a series of drawings exploring an idiosyncratic suburbia and, by extension, the spatio-temporal qualities of cultural artifacts in a modern Australian context. The works are a response to adopting the role of a flâneur in mostly suburban spaces and using the philosophies of psychogeography as a lens through which to celebrate the banal and the ruptures that occur within it.
Each drawing negotiates an element of humour when navigating the everyday by presenting an imagined narrative, derivative of its significance occupying a given mundane setting, and a visual punch line.
The drawings are excerpts from the artists’ visual journal, itself serving as an authentic voyeuristic tool of documentation and reconnaissance, while the use of materials such as texta, pen and white-out further highlight and draw on implications of accessibility and banality reflected in the subject matter.
A number of works are double sided and suspended in the space, revealing slight traces of the opposite drawing through the paper. Patchy bleeding and faint suggestions of line nod to connotations of memory and permeation within the ephemeral and perennial suburban landscape.
exhibited at Cool Change Contemporary 2019
photo credit: Paul Sutherland
GIF credit: Emma Buswell