Creep

BRIT BUNKLEY
Brit Bunkley’s Dangerous Songs series continues the artist’s focus on paranoid apocalyptic fear, tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony.  The works are created directly from virtual 3D files using new rapid prototyping techniques that create actual physical objects from digital files, treated with Day-Glo paint. Common irrational fears are manifest in Bunkley’s supersized luminous creatures, which populate a darkened House of Horrors-esque environment, forming an experience of the work which is both ghastly and humorous.

JOSEPHINE CACHEMAILLE
Concerned with personal and universal insecurity and anxiety, Josephine Cachemaille’s diverse practice sceptically investigates the phenomenon of positive psychology.  Her sculptures imitate amulets, talismans or voodoo objects, referencing superstition, folk magic and religion.  Often replicating human hands, these works offer a crude, grungy version of body parts, creating a visual and visceral friction for the viewer.  Cachemaille’s beautifully rendered painting includes the use of anthropomorphised animals and simmering scenes of suburban tension to expose collective fears.

JONATHAN CAMERON
In his Vamp series, Jonathan Cameron explores popular culture’s obsession with the beautiful and seductive vampire figure; a physical manifestation of the desirable other.   Alluring photographic images of high teas immediately appeal to the senses; examination of the accompanying texts reveals blood as an ingredient in each recipe.  The seductive qualities expressed through each image functions in a similar way to the vampire in popular culture; the viewer is engaged in such a way that they come to accept the abject.

KEVIN CAPON
Photographer Kevin Capon’s images form a catalogue of modern conditions and anxieties, tacitly expressed and undeniably powerful.  By resisting narrative or representation in a conventional sense, images become visceral and psychologically compelling; the viewer is invited to speculate on the intended narrative, or to simply appreciate the image in formal terms.  Using a wide range of photographic techniques, Capon’s deadpan style removes any context from his emblematic objects; thus the referential properties of the object are corrupted and meaning is transformed through the image-making process.

MATT COYLE
Matt Coyle is a Tasmania-based artist fascinated with uneasy narratives, incorporating both mundane and surreal elements in a practice which includes prints and original drawings.  Coyle’s technically faultless ultra fine ink technique is evident across his work, and has led to his engagement with graphic novels like Worry Dolls as a means to communicate his uneasy narratives.  Hisrealistic drawing style provides a startling entry point to his haunted and dreamlike world; beautifully rendered scenes reveal themselves to be instilled with disquiet and anxiety.

CATHERINE ELLIS
Catherine Ellis experiments with ways of making work that plays with our tendency to anthropomorphise and cherish feeble and fragile figures. Each sculpture is individually prepared to embody the exaggerated form of a sombre somnambulist, weary and sorrowful. Ellis’s practice reflects her curiosity with peoples’ conditioned response to animally, examining the ways in which humans locate their understanding between self and animal. Using a mixture of cuteness and melancholy, the work depicts scenarios that evoke our tendency to construct strange attachments the animal kingdom.

JAMES R FORD
James R Ford's varied practice reveals a dry sense of humour present, with gestures that extend on childhood play through references or materials.  Schrodinger’s Cat in the Hatalludes to Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment which uses the metaphor of a cat in a box as a vehicle to explain a theoretical paradox in sub-atomic physics.  Ford’s work presents Zappo the Magician perpetually revealing a toy cat from his top hat, repeating the same actions and incanting the magical word “Abracadabra.” Sometimes the trick goes horribly wrong and a bloodied, mutilated cat is conjured up in this warped reality, based on Schrodinger’s paradox.

LIAM GERRARD
Liam Gerrard realistic portraits throw a harsh spotlight over marginalised subjects, exposing every feature and flaw, no matter how unflattering or malignant.  Gerrard’s selection of challenging subjects demonstrates his willingness to dismantle clichés of the portraiture, selecting figures deemed ugly or unworthy of attention and treating them with engrossing detail in a monumental scale, demanding notice from the viewer.  The grotesque humour in these works forces the viewer to consider their own aesthetic values.

CLARE KIM
Drawn from a variety of sources, Clare Kim’s intensely detailed hand-lettered texts are particularly concerned with mythologies, folklore and witchcraft. Sources for these works include the Wikipedia entry for ‘Death’ and an ancient love spell that speaks of a dangerously obsessive infatuation.  By minutely repeating these texts and phrases, they become fervent prayers or malevolent curses.  While the content is ultimately inaccessible and indecipherable, the meaning and intention becomes more potent. 

CLINTON PHILLIPS
Clinton Phillips’ three-dimensional works offer an ambiguous combination of mechanical and organic forms, creating objects which are at the same time present elements of grotesque organisms and banal mechanisms.  His silhouettes and contours are often pared down yet are instantly recognisable, as the artist pastiches ‘visual bundles’ – collections of significant moments – and translates them onto flat planes.