drawings
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From left: Around the World (front, 141x190cm), Messier 87 (front, 130x190), fifo (front).
2024. Oil on canvas, rope and hardware.
Installation at 2024 VCA Graduate Show.
“Three canvas panels are cinched in their top corners by rough metal hooks, strung up to the ceiling with rope and hanging like pieces of meat. Both sides of the panels feature oil paintings of galaxies, oysters with pearls, assorted viscera and… wait, is that from a Daft Punk music video? Hunter Smith’s Messier 87, Fifo and Around the World combine the cosmic vastness of space with the alien-ness of nature and the body. Messier 87’s black hole is framed on both sides by the grotesque fleshiness of oyster meat. On the work’s reverse, an ultrasound is tipped on its side and paired with what appears to be a close-up study of an oyster shell containing a pearl. The images may seem unlikely bedfellows, but they are united by a shared sense of form, the ripples of the ultrasound mirroring the intricacies of the oyster meat’s grooves and furrows. Similarly, the explosive titular Messier 87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy, recalls both the oyster’s connective tissue, and also the glimmering pearl that lies at its centre. I’m reminded of the Fibonacci sequence’s recurrence in nature, governing the patterns of growth of some natural objects—from the leaves on trees to arms of spiral galaxies”.
- Pru Anderson, Mass Memo, Memo Review.
Read the full article: https://mass.memoreview.net/2024/painting-victorian-college-of-the-arts-by-pru-anderson
Images: Kim Feng Photography.