Erased: Contemporary Australian Drawing


You pass through an ever present past. Lou Reed from Magic and Loss (1992)

Vernon Ah Kee, Unwritten, 2008, installation view

To erase is to change. As an inherent part of the creative methodology of drawing, this exhibition highlights how erasure is a generative strategy, one that proposes a future of political, social, environmental and aesthetic transformations. In some works, erasure acts as a mode of expression or it operates by layering the past with the present or as a proposition about action and trace. In each case, it operates as some kind of palimpsest.

A palimpsest is traditionally understood as a manuscript upon which a text has been incompletely or wholly erased to make space for another text. However, the word has developed a number of meanings across different fields. More broadly, it can refer to any object or place that reflects its history – the traces of buildings in ruins are a prime example – the past physically embodied in the present. In each definition, a palimpsest is a densely articulated practice of marking, erasing and rewriting, layering moments in time, one over the other, producing a complicated texture of spatiality and temporality – an ever present past.

Interpreted in this way, one can posit that, of the works in this exhibition, Christian Capurro’s function more literally as a palimpsest while Tom Nicholson’s and Raquel Ormella’s employ it as a mode of expression, referencing the past by way of visual fragments, and in the work of Vernon Ah Kee, Simryn Gill and Jonathan Jones, erasure and layering also suggest productive dimensions of meaning and transformation.

ARTISTS: Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Capurro, Simryn Gill, Jonathan Jones, Tom Nicholson, Raquel Ormella.

CURATOR: Natasha Bullock, Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

TOUR: Singapore, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen (2009-2010)