CAMERON GILL
ARTHUR AND MARTHA
SOPHIE GANNON GALLERY
08 NOV 2022 – 26 NOV 2022
Arthur and Martha effervesces a new intimacy with paint, a comfortability in a loosening of agentic grip. Cam allows indistinct ends and beginnings, and blurs the micro with the macro, whilst the depth and essence of Victorian trees are entirely and honestly encapsulated.
Oranges, blues and reds of the sleepy behemoth trucks, which exist in such bold proximity to Merri Creek, have induced Cam’s more industrial reimagining of the local flora. Blue, yellow and ember orange hues, create prisms and caustic ripples that engulf us in either water, forest, or both. Arthur and Martha’s palette and dynamism obfuscates the elements, creating a sense of submersion in Cam’s work, we are within the creek or the trees, rather than simply questioning from which perspective we view them.
Rusty and rickety, the printing press swallows Cam’s colour and shapes. Without whole intention and with wet paint, the press helpfully prevented Cam from exercising too much precision. Marks of paint on a board, covered with paper and felt blanket, rolled and cranked through the press and then, new images were born. Perhaps not appearing as hoped for but the ghostly stains left behind are one step further removed from the original source, honing in on Cam's focus of shape and colour, rather than assured brushstrokes crafting a realist expression of the verdant source. The prints have a psychological lightness, the whiter space around the colour has a delicate airiness that the paintings’, laboured and scratched surfaces do not.
Cam’s destructive and reproductive use of bleach and ink generates a hazy dynamism. Watery scenes of coral-like limbs creep and weave, fronds of dark oily kelp or rain-veiled shrubs, hum behind the inky mesh curtain of deep blues and acidic shocks of bleach. It seduces us to look beyond it, as it both reveals and conceals shape and form. Almost gothic, it simulates the soft thrill of the sublime.
The honeycomb logos, give us a turn through an octagon bolt, or a peek through a child’s kaleidoscope. These playful miniatures are presented to us in the form of a circle or the clean geometric dimensions of an eight-sided cog, juxtaposing the hardness and softness of their round and sharp edges.
Arthur and Martha has a strangeness, a reflection of unsureness translated abstractly by paint, or by trees - with paint. Oscillating in styles and approaches, size and focus and blur, this family of paintings remain as interconnected objects, joined at their essence as a study of trees and the bush.
By Marni Elder