Proposition for a Panorama Towards the Norther Top, finalist in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award, 2015.
This work is part of an ongoing series of works loosely linked by investigation into the propositional location of the urban sublime, western landscape and the historic ‘Romantic’, as well as 18th century tourism and associated consumption of landscape imagery.
This work follows from a series of experimental or propositional urban mountain forms across 2015: MFA graduation work in 2014, and Paramor Award finalist, 2015.
The mountain frequently functions within western landscape genre as a shorthand for the natural sublime (Romantic painters such as Caspar David Frederick, Turner,and others).
Against this is the economically formed shapes within the city, especially the skyscraper/ tower block, and in particular, large city building sites such as Barangaroo in Sydney. Within the city, the drivers of form are almost purely economic, rejecting notions of the aesthetic, romantic, experiential seen in the Romantic Sublime.
This work collides the two narratives, to hopefully pass comment on European Colonial notions of landscape and ownership of land, contemporary levers of economics, corruption of land development and the residual marks on the urban landscape.
The wall drawing repurposes the 19th century painting by Eugene von Guerard, North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko, representing it collaged behind a flyscreen mesh rendered mountain of new buildings. Von Guerard’s romantic treatment of the highest point in Australia is an important painting in Australian art history and it was a pleasure to open it up to new interpretations.
The clincher for selecting this painting to renegotiate in this collage / wall drawing was the gendered gesture of land ownership enacted by the scientist and the artist in the lower left corner of the picture, which continued an enquiry opened in Growth at all Costs!. about the performance of Capitalism.
Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award is on from:
30 May 2015 – 26 Jul 2015,
782 Kingsway,
Gymea NSW.
Eugene von Guerard, North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko, 1862