THE VISCERAL GARDEN AT THE CHALK HORSE

By Benjamen Judd

Sydney’s art scene is one that we cannot promote enough. A little gritty and often challenging, there is always something happening that provides us the opportunity to expand the way that we think. One of our favourite places to such expanding is at the Chalk Horse Gallery in Surry Hills.

This month, the Chalk Horse is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic works and a multi-channel video installation by John A Douglas.

The Visceral Garden – Landscape & Specimen will launch the 2014 exhibition program at a new gallery location in Darlinghurst. John A Douglas will present a photographic essay of analogue prints, back illuminated transparencies, and a four channel performative video developed from a residency in 2012-2013 at the Museum of Human Disease, UNSW.

The work articulates the ontological experience of chronic illness through interpretive narrative, incorporating the motifs of Greco-Roman storytelling (Arachne and Orpheus) with macro photography, digital collage and performance set amongst imaginary landscapes. Transforming from gold to copper and then into a red figure, the artist is trapped by Arachne and then falls from a portal into a visceral underworld where he is eventually devoured by diseased organs. Organ specimens which correspond with the artists’ medical conditions are collaged into surreal landscapes, signifying the various states that his body experiences; a forest of bones represents hyperphosphorus, a macro view of an asthmatic lung becomes a satellite view of a desert landscape, and a parathyroid gland evokes a strange underwater creature.  The work defines the delicate balance and daily struggle  between illness and recovery, death and survival and the interconnectedness of all living things.

The Visceral Garden – Landscape & Specimen will show at the Chalk Horse Gallery from February 6 to March 8 2014.

For more information, and directions to the gallery, head here.