What I bring to the table - Lyox Gallery, Drummoyne

I had a nice invitation to contribute to this show and put in some collages, one of which I sold. The woman who bought the item also had something in the show. Trinity Myers' piece (see below) is a fridge covered in some sort of growth, something green that stands out against the hard lines of the kitchen appliance.

Trinity has made a kind of domestic collage. The fridge contains food but it doesn't chill, everything is at room temperature so you'd probably not want to eat it. We chatted for a while and I took this snapshot. I was reminded of a work I made last year, one of my Fridge! series (see below).

I make a similar comparison in a brochure produced for Ryde Library collage classes. A household fridge is a kind of collage, except instead of glue you use magnets. In my series I try to show this alongside the remnants of a life - a life I lived - illustrated with the sort of snapshots people put on their fridges. I mean everyoine has a fridge right? 

In the digital collage the man at bottom left is Italo Svevo, whose works I studied for my BA back in the 1980s. It is a pen name. And yes that photo in the centre at right is me, when I was young and before I came back to art four years ago. The photo of Svevo whas when he was young, probably around the time of the Great War. 

Funnily enought I had some related content in my Fecebook feed. There are Svevo castles in Italy, and the region they are named after is in south western Germany, it includes Bavaria. Frederic II an Italian king whose seat centred in Sicily might have been the reason Ettore Schmidt used the name, it is hard to know. I mean I used to know a lot of things about Svevo, actually I wrote my honours thesis about him. But that was a long time ago

Trinity's fridge has a kind og algal bloom. But the correspondence is deeper, Svevo learned English from James Joyce when both men lived in Trieste. And Joyce's most famous character is named Bloom. I find it impossible to overlook the conclusion that Svevo was a model for Bloom.

Frederic II and his court were the models for modern Italian, and were the source of the poetry we immediately link in our minds with Medieval Italy. In fact the evidence is that FII wrote poetry himself, some kind of Marcus Aurelius. As a form the sonnet grew out of native Sicilian forms around the 13th C.

The image above shows some paintings by Milka Ordonez, the mother of the show curator. The hanging style really  brings out the personalities of the individual works. The painting below is by Marci Ordonez the curator.

This painting is sort of a companion piece to the famous photo of the sunbather, an image so iconic that it has come to represent the country itself. Marci has kind of taken a detour around the man lying on his stomach, soaking up the sun's healthy rays. Her painting is not black and white but colour, and it is well made for while the lifeguard stands in the centre of the composition the eye automatically goes to the distance, where the people are swimming in the blue water.

Nobody reads 'Ulysses' these days but there is a scene in the novel where Bloom is at the beach. I am not sure if Marci wanted to make this comparison. Actully lifeguards in Australia do not wear yellow and maroon, as shown above. Maroon a wonderful colour however and the artist must be aware of her switch. The green and blue and yellow io the landscape remain true to life.