‘Pause’ comprises black and white text-based panels; Sebastian Moody’s latest suite of language-driven gallery artworks which continue in the art history traditions of 1960’s conceptual art and ‘concrete poetry’.
‘Pause’ also builds upon Moody’s 2019 projection artwork, ‘Seeing’, which was the inaugural Arts Queensland funded artwork commission for the ‘Belltower’ at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Moody’s artworks expand on our relationship with language and how it is perceived, drawing on the connotations of specific words when they are placed in certain arrangements and configurations as a painting. He seeks to incite initial reactions, confound our comparisons and effect our understandings when his chosen words are accompanied by another.
Sebastian Moody, OCCUPY SWEATY VOICES PRIMAL POLICE, from the series ‘Seeing’, 2020, acrylic on board, 60.9 x 45cm. Photograph: Louis Lim. Courtesy the artist and Onespace Gallery, Queensland
Tim Riley Walsh writes in the accompanying catalogue essay: ‘In a sense, Moody’s new works demand similar processes from their viewers as these medical tools; certainly, they test our sight, but the results of our looking do not determine the capacity of our vision and need for lenses or treatment to correct them.’
‘Instead,’ he continues, ‘they become a communal examination of language’s journey through our minds: what we read from them, what we project onto their combinations, perhaps what our imagination or internal biases jump to first. When ‘Seeing’ was projected onto the façade of Fortitude Valley’s Judith Wright Centre, the exercise became a vast public evaluation. At times, the six-letter words’ legibility was challenged as their resolution was playfully shifted. Select words appeared blurry at first, before becoming focused. At other moments of transition, some letters from previous terms remained and others disappeared to reveal alternates, constructing a new word from the carcass of the previous.’
Onespace Gallery
7 August to 12 September 2020
Queensland
