Redaction | See Where it Drifts

Book Accommodation Official Website

Galerie Pompom, Chippendale

by Sharne Wolff

If you’ve ever browsed the pages of Das Superpaper or the quarterly journal Manuscript, you’ve already witnessed the work of Elliot Bryce Foulkes in his day job as art director and designer. Clearly a man of many talents, Foulkes now appears with his exhibition of new mixed media and installation work entitled Redaction. The concept behind the show is to shift mundane materials (think chamois, vinyl, perspex, carpet and leather) and unremarkable graphic forms to the gallery space from their original context, and thereby transform, or ‘redact’ them, into works of art. The results charge Foulkes’ abstracted and once-familiar objects with new meaning –while simultaneously leaving the viewer uncertain as to just what it is they’re looking at.

Meanwhile at Pompom Sydney College of the Arts PhD student Hayley Megan French is holding her first solo exhibition See Where it Drifts. Consisting ofsix large paintings in acrylic paint on canvas, each work uses an effective combination of only three colours – bright white and cadmium orange on black backgrounds. French’s research has led her to visit Indigenous communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory and her art draws on these experiences for her unique take on contemporary Australian landscape. Despite their casual appearance, French’s dancing fragments and intriguing shape liaisons are the consequence of numerous layers of paint.

Pic: Elliott Bryce Foulkes, You are here now, 2014, vinyl cut decal, dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Pompom, Sydney.