One Man’s Trash is Another Collective’s Exhibition

By Benjamen Judd

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Catch the last week of Never-Never Land at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and experience the disconcerting experience of seeing your lives in trash form transformed into art!

Our lives are filled with ‘stuff’. Things that, thanks to culture production and human inventiveness, sit on the fine line between object and art, decoration and clutter. The current exhibition at Paddington’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Never-Never Land, is the work of five artists – Dylan Martorell, Sanne Mestrom, Esther Stewart, Jake Walker and Sarah Cantos – who have come together to repurpose ‘stuff’ and turn it into an exhibition that challenges the way we look at the things we collect in our daily lives.

The artists in Never-Never Land take pre-existing cultural, commodity, musical and art-historical forms – such as maps, instruments, and icons from the modernist art canon – and repurpose them in their work. Engaging alternately in modes of critique, historicism and adaptation, some of these appropriations are literal, such as Dylan Martorell working with found objects; others are formal, such as Esther Stewart’s appropriation of maps; whilst some are speculative and fantastical, as with Sanné Mestrom’s approach to modernism, or Jake Walker’s personal take on architectural history.

Never-Never Land is now showing at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington.