Thursday, April 17, 2014

Undercoat reviews Ben Howe at Strange Attractor/Paper Dolls

Thanks to Eric Brotchie from Undercoat for this review of my latest group show at D11. Check out the website and read the article at: http://www.undercoat.net/undercoat-reviews-ben-howe-at-strange-attractorpaper-dolls/

Friday, April 4, 2014

STRANGE ATTRACTOR, Opens this Saturday

April 12-26, 2014 at D11 Gallery, Docklands. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;” So runs a line from a poem by W. B Yeats that imagines the earthly conditions which prefigure the Apocalypse and the Christian second coming. The line is prophetic; not so much of the end of the world but of a mathematical phenomenon, a ‘strange attractor’, described some fifty years later by scientists researching non linear systems and chaos theory. I won’t baffle you with science, but think ‘The Butterfly Effect’; think order, flow, chaos; and then view the paintings of three Melbourne painters showing at D11 Gallery in the Docklands. These three artists depict the world in a state of becoming; time doesn’t stand still in these works. They are not frantic images; there is an air of stillness about them, but a stillness that suggests change rather than stasis. Grant Hill has painted Australian suburbia in a state of slumber. He pictures the Great Australian Dream, the suburban house snug in its self-centered allotment. Paul Keller has also painted landscapes, although not of an Australian kind. Hieronymus Bosch meets Hello Kitty would best describe these exquisitely painted works. Ben Howe presents the urban streets as places of digital discord. Strolling figures dissolve and reform in binary bifurcation.