Sutton Gallery is pleased to announce Jackson Slattery’s inaugural solo exhibition, Props. This series is comprised of meticulously executed watercolours and 3-dimensional works that investigate the fantastic, peculiar and often missed gestures of everyday life.
Slattery’s previous work has explored varied subject matter from the spectacularised personas of celebrities to the poetry of quotidian moments. Sourcing pictures from his own collection, Flickr and Google, this series explores notions of artifice and reality by referencing the fabricated materiality of film props.
One work in the show is a beautifully rendered depiction of a hand pressing a book against a black balloon. The book’s title “Marble and Clay” hints at themes of imitation, authenticity and the malleability of form, each alluded to in this body of work. A diptych depicts a pair of mosaic-tiled figures that could either be street performers or garden statues, their life-like rendering suspends them half-way between animate and inanimate objects. These watercolours exemplify Slattery’s process of creating remarkably haunting and dramatic images from fleeting moments, while revealing the fastidious nature of his labor intensive mark-making technique.
Slattery’s sculptures amplify the theatre and ambiguity in the narrative of the show, taken from his watercolours, they blur the distinction between the real and the imagined. This tongue-in-cheek repetition of imagery presents the viewer with a re-constructed entity that is true to scale and itself becomes the object of representation within the frame.
Slattery’s work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout Melbourne. In 2010, his work was featured in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His work has been included in several important art prizes; he was a finalist in the Siemens-RMIT Fine Arts Travelling Scholarship Award in 2003 and ABN AMRO Emerging Artists Awards in 2008; in 2005 he won the Artholes Self Portrait Prize, Artholes Gallery, Melbourne; whilst in 2009 he won the Metro5 Art Award. Slattery has participated in a number of residencies and in 2009 was a studio artist at Gertrude Street Art Spaces, Melbourne.
Artist’s profile