Michael Mark & David Wallage

Lost & Found

April 26th – May 13th, 2023

As artists we understood during COVID-19 that making a connection(s) beyond our own ‘bubble’ was not only healthy, but helpful in growing our practices. This understanding led to our first collaboration, Dualism, in 2021. Following that success, we decided to push the boundaries of working together.  This sophomore show expands on the first by more easily allowing ourselves to revise, revisit and rework each other’s contributions with confidence. As the works shuttled back and forth across Melbourne, composed primarily of detritus from our studios: life drawings, charts, maps and sketches combined with hardware store staples—plaster, pigment, glue and rejected paint pots, they were subjected to a variety of tools and techniques.  A shared aesthetic, and the trust we have in each other’s practice, allowed us to freely carve, cut, and manipulate paper and mixed media to find compositional solutions that balance texture, value, and line as we winnowed down the works. Box cutters, sanders, dipping, and spraying all played a role in the creative process. There were early successes, and these were plucked out and placed in the ‘finished basket’, some took longer to mature, and a few never made it to fruition, Lost & Found is the result of this process.