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Actually Energy Help Light
David Egan

David Egan, Actually Energy Help Light, 2015, installation at Gertrude Contemporary.
David Egan, Actually Energy Help Light, 2015, installation at Gertrude Contemporary.

31 January -
14 March 2015

200 Gertrude Street

200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy

Opening: Friday 30 January, 68pm

For Actually Energy Help Light, David Egan presented several different bodies of paintings and text. A new work was painted using pigment from the beautiful yet noxious flowering plant Morning Glory, a climbing weed that competes with cultivated plants by growing laterally, stopping light from penetrating its blanketing surface. This painting changes colour in time, it is a pictorial registration of the decomposing plant matter. Other paintings extend Egan's Painting Playing Cards series (2013–), which invoke a form of decorative artifice introduced to the back of the formerly blank playing card in the nineteenth century to address a social epidemic of card cheating. Asparation Frieze produces a painting of architectural proportions, which cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one vantage, always gesturing to the peripheral. Egan’s written text works produce a meta-fictional space in which the concerns of the paintings criss-cross in a succession of mental images.

Discussion with the artist at 1pm Saturday 31 January 2015.

David Egan, b. 1989, lives and works as an artist in Melbourne. He graduated from a BA in Fine Art, Curtin University, 2011 and a BA in Fine Art (Honors), Monash University, 2013. Solo exhibitions include: Underground Museum Tactic, St Heliers Street Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Painting Playing Cards, Substation, Melbourne, 2014; Plantings, Adult Contemporary, Perth, 2014; The Yellow Curtain, Institute of Jamais Vu, London, 2012; The unknown by the more unknown, OK Gallery, Perth, 2012; and Seria Ludo, Galleria, Perth, 2011. Group exhibitions include: BLOOD, SUGAR, SEX, MAGIC, Slopes, Melbourne, 2014; Hire a magician to speak on your behalf, he is a great entertainer and the audience is blown away, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne, 2013; and Wilderness Years, OK Gallery, Perth, 2011. Egan has undertaken artist residencies at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2012; Fremantle Arts Centre, 2012; and Amstel 41, Amsterdam, 2013. He has also worked collaboratively with Patrick Miller as Natural Mystery, which existed as an exhibition and project space in their shared residential garage in Perth, 2011–12. Their program culminated with an exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre, 2013, titled Magical Signs: Exchange and Utopia, that ran alongside the publication of a compendium of the same name.

To view the catalogue for this exhibition, please Click Here

Artists

  • David Egan
Public Program

The Czech Magnate, a circular

PerformanceTuesday 10 March, 7am200 Gertrude Street

'The Czech Magnate, a circular', a radio play written by Mark von Schlegell ‘in the service of David Egan’, was produced especially for the occasion of this exhibition.

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Gertrude Contemporary

Wurundjeri Country
21-31 High Street
Preston South VIC
Melbourne, Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday 11am–5pm

Gertrude Glasshouse

Wurundjeri Country
44 Glasshouse Road
Collingwood VIC
Melbourne, Australia

Opening hours:
Thursday–Saturday 12–5pm