|February 1 – 27th| A series of works on paper by David Freney-Mills presented as a wall installation exploring the visual aesthetics of text through the repetition of individual words drawn in varied media. As the chosen word for each work is drawn through washes of subtle colour and textural skeins sometimes letters merge together while at other points fragment apart, until a resonance is created that poses questions about the nature of reading and that of looking and examines the point when literal information can be subsumed within a visual language. A language that is at times “Chthonic-like”, (the word chthonic in psychological terms relates to the unconscious) that is intuitive and open to spontaneity yet where there is also a system or structure that guides the path of each work, a system of repetition in which fractures appear, a result of the durations of time and the flux of perception in the drawing process.
Melbourne based Freney-Mills completed a PostGraduate diploma at Victorian College of the Arts in 2005 – where he created his first text based work on canvas. He was artist-in-resident at St.Vincent’s Hospital in 2010/11 initiating a program titled “Patient Records”. He has staged solo exhibitions at PB Gallery, Steps Gallery and Trocadero Art Space. Freney-Mills extensive travels throughout Japan and Asia act as the basis for ongoing research into the techniques from contemporary and traditional Japanese drawing, painting and dye art practitioners.
