Sumer is pleased to present a selection of recent works by artists from Australia and New Zealand.
In these works we see traces, remnants and erosions - indexical signs, diffuse images and debased forms. The works possess seemingly contradictory attributes: gothic and camp, crassness and beauty, solemnity and jest.
Kathy Temin's unmistakable monochrome faux-fur wooded landscapes draw on the cartoon-comedic and the classically formal. Lara Merrett's immersion inks on drop-cloth canvas attend to both ab-ex sanctimony and the unprecious everyday - replete with holes and patched repairs. André Piguet constructs his own material vocabulary, in screen-like wash painting and 3D-printed sculpture. Miles Hendricks' paintings, too, host the index of a personal realm, simultaneously imaginary and also culturally concrete: wizards, castles, toadstools and Pokemon speak to a specifically contemporary anachronism; Nicola Shanley similarly mines a baroque sensibility into the present.
Reflecting revised understandings of conventional modes of painting and sculpture, these objects assert a worldliness - an awareness of what has come before - yet seem unwilling to accept their context as given.