7pm 12 November 2021 – BackDock Arts – Curated by Samia Kalpakos
Combining the fragility and steadfast nature of visual and auditory mediums with the impermanent and portable nature of a greeting card to emphasise the surprising artistry of the card.
Sending and receiving greeting cards is a common practice during important milestones in our lives and the lives of others. Now more than ever. Cards are rarely displayed, however; they are either discarded once enough time has passed or stored away. Does our value for the greeting card change once it is displayed in a gallery setting? Why?
Feel Like Celebrating
My work revolves around evoking a feeling through abstract elements, rather than representation. Thinking on the premise of the greeting card, I reflected on how varied and flexible the artistic “rules” are. Subtracting popular motifs (cakes, candles, presents, sparklers, champagne bottles, and so on) and text-based messages (“Happy Birthday!” “Congratulations!” “-insert off-colour joke about aging here-”) my goal with this piece was to evoke the emotion surrounding the joyous occasion limiting myself to more granular elements (colour, shape, flow or implication of ‘movement’).
What I also strove to capture was that not all celebrations go to plan, or turn out how you may hope. This I did through the colour palette, which I toned down significantly from the point of absolute brightness. The palette took some tweaking before landing on a tetradic combination that best captured this nuance. Nothing in life is as simple or as sweet as we’d hope, and some sweet things leave a bitter aftertaste despite our best efforts. Hopefully, this piece serves as an acknowledgement that even happy occasions do not always meet our ideal, but also that this doesn’t necessarily negate our desire or deservedness to celebrate.
I Always Never Forget
This collaborative piece with Jet Chaffey began as an ode to the ingenuity that emerges every time the greeting card gets forgotten. A hurried and reassuring message of love scrawled on the back of a receipt; a joke between siblings shared on – of all things – a repurposed cardboard toilet roll tube; a chocolate wrapper; all the priceless scraps and detritus that slip down the couch cracks of a relationship, or friendship, or family. Those little things that mean nothing and everything, all at once, that we found our relationships upon. Pieces that we leave behind when things end.
It was tricky to formalise this into a concrete expression of that amorous co-existence, especially since artistically I have traditionally avoided representational art at all costs. The poetry within was essential to inform the final shape this would take. A messy composition of crinkled artefacts that could just as easily be thrown out as kept are strewn across a surface; a personal gallery of historical love. Stylistically, I aimed for the same messy feel to reflect the spontaneity of these flighty moments and the wear from being carried in one’s wallet for time unknown.
