EXHIBITIONS / BOOMER

01.03.2012 to 31.03.2012

Miranda Parkes has never shown much respect for the traditional painting and the works in Boomer are no exception. With major seismic activity in her home city as fuel, Parkes’ paintings teeter on a knife edge between exuberant life and imminent disaster.

The show plays on the mind’s compulsion to pick out order from chaos and at the same time riffs on Modernist motifs such as those found in Bridget Riley’s optical masterpieces. The picture plane is disrupted and undermined, with patterns that congeal at a distance giving way to dizzying chaos close-up. The stretched canvas support that you might expect to signal a painting show is completely absent. In Boomer the canvas has been ruched and rippled, reaching out into sculptural space, or substituted by stand-in props taking the form of a giant billboard or a tiny ceramic with heady, high-vis colours power-packed into unstable formations.

The works in Boomer together add up to up to a joyful exploration of the space of painting at the expanded (and expanding) edge of the discipline. They communicate the tension that comes from trying to quiet a pounding heart and hold a body still in a moving world.

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