OPEN DAY: 24 August | 10am – 2pm
OPEN EVENT: 24 August | 5pm – 7pm
Lounge gallery: gliff by Col Mac | 24 August – 28 September
Col Mac’s interdisciplinary practice destabilises our sense of time and place. It pulls the linear narrative out of focus, blurring and rearranging it until we are seeing a layered history flattened and condensed.
The paintings in gliff sample the forms and canon of British painting, from the prehistoric Uffington white horse etched in chalk on an Oxfordshire hillside, to royal portraits, religious scenes, and still life formats. They present this history of painting for what it has been: a visual language of symbols (fittingly, glyphs), a framework for interpreting and for memorialising. The past resurfaces on the same plane as the present in these works, creating something altogether new.
There is a tension between the artist, his historical reference points and the systems they represent—Mac being Anglo-Australian of Irish, Romani heritage—and the paintings flirt with both reverence and irony.
A transient moment, a glimpse, and a sudden fright are among the many meanings of the Scottish and Northern English word gliff. Fulfilling all these, spectres hover outside the borders of the canvas. Mac’s careful cropping asks us to think as much about absence as about presence. His desaturated palette verges sometimes on nostalgia, urging us towards a memory of something familiar that we can’t place. Though static, the works function as if we were walking past, glimpsing a fragment of an image, then moving onwards. Just a memory lingers.
– Miranda Hine