Shimmer

About

Shimmer

Our Neon Foe studio artists at Durden and Ray

Artists:
Carl Baratta, Ciaran Begley, Priscilla Bourne, Kate Brown, Kit Bylett, Angela Garrick, Adrian De Giorgio, Drew Holland, Sophie Kitson, Simon Lawrence, Owen Lewis, Kasane Low, Audrey Newton, Ty Pownall, Laurence Williams, Ryat Yezbick

Curated by: Our Neon Foe

Shimmer

Shimmer is a stunning phenomenon on the surface of water, like dreams that are only just lucid on top of the watery unconscious. The artworks have a shimmer-like effect of mirroring artists’ underlying desires. Part of the shimmer process is being heated just below boiling point while bubbling gently.

Shimmer is the fugitive gleam escaping

Shimmer is the captive dream evaporating

Shimmer is the oil slick bamboozling the eye

Shimmer is the intangible fog engulfing our cities, sharpening surfaces, levitating objects in the dream swell

This is the tale of two cities - Sydney and Los Angeles - baking in heat haze and barely clinging on to reality. Cities that are held together by arterial roads and just the barest suggestion of a shared experience, like a vast cloud defined by the evasive words of a poet.

Skating beneath kaleidoscopic surface-level slicks, the reality barely ever accords with the appearance.

Our Neon Foe is a gallery, a studio complex and a loose collective of artists who curate monthly exhibitions of emerging Sydney and international artists. During COVID, many of us escaped into alternate worlds of imagination, shifting unconscious states, living just as much in our beds as out of them. The new (un)reality allowed us a new freedom, as we shimmered in and out of our old identities, bringing buried fantasies to light.

Curatorial statement written by Elliot Waugh and Priscilla Bourne on behalf of the artists at Our Neon Foe Gallery.