PIERS GREVILLE: OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR

7 - 29 October 2023

Images

Overview

After much activity interstate and overseas, ‘Objects In The Mirror’ is the first major solo exhibition of the work of Piers Greville to show in Naarm / Melbourne. The show presents an evolution of the motif of terrain found in much of the artist’s work to date.

"The specificity of place which underpins these works is thrown into question by the erasure or distortion of the place’s identity. Landscape and it’s identity is a loaded question anywhere on the Australian continent, but the particular site of the middle Snowy River in Ngarigu county, carries the weight of an ongoing identity crisis. It is through the tumult of indigenous history, settler narratives and contemporary climate events which these paintings interrogate.

The paintings employ a particular literal lens and geometry, a parallel perspective without a vanishing point or horizon - objects in the mirror. They give a similar effect of flattened perspective to that found in certain medieval paintings as well as electron microscopy and interstellar telescopy. As if viewing the landscape from outer space, this view is seen as an explosion of a single point of view, and so of the ego. Stemming from a prior fascination with depicting projected narratives into a landscape these paintings illustrate the possibility of multiple states. To invert the truth, to strip the adornment of identity, and to do all this in retrospect is all that’s left to do."

Works