The Night Sky

By Andrew Frost

Since co-founding Das Superpaper Nick Garner has been busy – from editing and distributing the physical paper, to managing the web version, not to mention all the ‘added value’ context of video interviews with artists, he seemingly does it all. Well, not quite.  Making a return to exhibiting with The Night Sky, Garner’s art making has a decidedly conceptual bent, making paintings that, he claims, are silhouettes of paintings in the Art Gallery of NSW’s collection of modern western paintings and which “…are stacked against the wall, the public is invited to take a painting, night turns to day.”

Based on the processes of “dissemination and disintegration” Garner’s work plays on a familiarity with the AGNSWs collection, or more precisely, the idea of that collection. Confronted with a black monochrome the viewer projects the idea of a remembered work into the frame, a process defeated by the absolute blackness of what may as well be the night sky, the idea disintegrated by the physical presence of the unseen. What are we looking at here? Probably nothing, but also everything.

Until March 15

Kudos Gallery, Paddington

Pic: Nick Garner, The Night Sky, 2014.