Exhibits,

Michael Ciavarella Perception Management

Opening: Opening Wednesday 30 August, 6-8pm Dates: 30 August – 23 September

Jean-Francois Millet’s 1857 painting ‘The Gleaners’, depicts three figures bent over collecting bits of grain left in a field following the harvest. Millet and others heralded the arrival of Realism, discarding the Romanticism/Classicism that had dominated European Art in the 19th Century; mythological subject matter was replaced by the ‘real’.

This exhibition consists of paintings of people doing things. The source material comes largely from found images – second hand books and magazines - gleaned from the discarded, leftover detritus of our predominately digital, image-based culture. The paintings attempt to grapple with what it means to make representational/figurative paintings a century and a half after the beginning of Realism. How can meaning be generated through painting? The paintings deploy ambiguity, uncertainty and humour, with a sense of failure and the absurd.

Michael Ciavarella is a Melbourne based artist. He graduated from the Victorian College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2006. He has exhibited locally and internationally including at Te Tuhi, Auckland, Westspace, TCB art inc and Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

Documentation by Christo Crocker.