Reflex Projects 2014-2022

Reflex Projects 2014-2022

Background:
REFLEX PROJECTS is an exhibition site, situated within Toowoomba, QLD, undertaken to demonstrate the varied, complex and extremely broad spectrum of divergent phenomena which comes out of painting. This is solely a wall painting exhibition project; where through the creation of wall paintings, it can lead to an intervention of meaning being established in a site as not a decorative function but as an artistic statement and / or proposition of intention or conceptual statement. REFLEX’s aim is to create an exhibition site that displays a wide range of national and international artists and their individual painting concerns. Each year 3 artists are invited to execute a wall painting, where through this process a dialogue will be created that demonstrates the unity of architecture to wall design (painting) that can be established through each invited artists own personal intensions. The aim is not to display wall painting as decoration but wall painting as expanded painted intent.

Contribution:
This catalogue represents the period between 2014-2022 of Reflex Projects that documents and archives the significant contribution the 20 national and international artists from Australia, France, Switzerland, Russia, Netherlands, Denmark, and The United States who contributed to the project through the conceptual and aesthetic expansion of painting into the field of wall painting. As well as co-directing the project I contributed a wall painting: ‘Wall Painting #329’. This wall painting is a part of the ongoing Organic Abstraction series consisting of paintings and wall paintings that examine the intuitive rather than the formal concerns and concepts of abstraction, through an exploration of the biomorphic structures inherent in art and construction within the natural and built (architecture) environments. The work continues to experiment with and explore the interlocking forms of spatial reconfiguration through varying methods of representation and abstraction. These are layered / situated either on a canvas or as a wall painting within an architectural environment where both become fields that govern the layered reading of the work.

Significance:
This publication is significant as the Reflex Projects is the only reductive, conceptual based wall painting project in Australia re-addressing the historical expansion and limits of painting from the early 20th century to now within a contemporary national and international field. The significant theoretical innovation of the project is addressing how the wall (determined by a buildings architecture) becomes a field of open possibilities (not unlike a blank canvas). However, in this field, the laneway, the street, the town, the city, and the meandering passer by all become locked into the subdivisions of colours, geometry and form that at once attempts to exploit the wall (as plane) and overcome it by expanding on its possibilities into new semi-permanent visual outcomes. The critical aesthetic strategies of the project investigate architectural space and how conceptual based abstraction creates an ongoing tension between the material and space. This exhibition is significant as it brought together three seminal historical national/international artists: John Nixon (AUS), Sydney Ball (AUS) and Olivier Mosset (CH/US), and seventeen national and international emerging, mid-career, senior career artists: Peter Demos (US), Blake Baxter (US), Ivan Belov (RU), Stephen Bram (AUS), David Thomas (AUS), Jan van der Ploeg (NL), Brad Buckley (AUS), Billy Gruner (AUS), Dimi Gred (RU), , Tarn McLean (AUS), Stephen Little (AUS), Lynne Harlow (US), Gilbert Hsiao (US), Tilman (USA/FR), Justin Andrews (AUS), Peter Holm (DK), and Kyle Jenkins (AUS).