Thing #91 on my list of 101 Things in 1001 Days: Visit 10 different galleries.
Dale Cox | Take Me With You
Australian Galleries, Collingwood
2 July – 20 July 2024
Artist’s statement:
In Take me with you the notion of convenience and the quick fix, so embedded in modern life, is dissected and re-presented as a conversation with nature.
The modern condition has resulted in a profound separation of mankind from the natural world. Likewise, there can be a tendency to insulate our personal selves from our own natural state. Increasing diagnoses of mental and physical malaise are met by an eager pharmaceutical industry offering chemical interventions.
Another defining feature of our modern world is an emphasis on convenience, quick fixes and ‘bite sized’ chunks of experience and consumption. These new works offer a playful nexus between our commoditised consumer society and the natural world. I offer easily swallowed doses of nature to which our biophilic* needs remain.
*Biophilic; a love of living things and nature, which some people believe humans are born with, the inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life.
Ubiquitous consumables such as aluminium soft drink cans are ideal vehicles for consumption on the go. Even a fire extinguisher might be seen as an urgent delivery system for nature. In other works, gas bottles are used to package or commodify the essence of a place and provide another useful container to remind that much like the drugs and processed foods we consume, the awe-inspiring wild places we might visit are absorbed and contained within us, and can sustain and enrich our lives in ways a pill or sugar never could.
As part of a living ecological system from which we often presume ourselves exempt, it’s becoming increasingly apparent we have paid a huge price for this exceptionalism. Perhaps instead of drugs and sugar hits we need most urgently to reconnect with our natural world, as an antidote or panacea against the stress and alienation of our fraught modern existence.
