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  Installation view in Actually Energy Help Light.

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  Painting Playing Cards (Owen Jones for De La Rue, c. 1850). Installation view in Actually Energy Help Light.

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  Trellis. Installation view in Actually Energy Help Light

DAVID EGAN, ACTUALLY ENERGY HELP LIGHT
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Exhibition opening: 6pm Friday 30 January 2015 

For Actually Energy Help Light, David Egan presented several different bodies of paintings and text. A new work was painted using pigment from the beautiful yet noxious flowering plant Morning Glory, a climbing weed that competes with cultivated plants by growing laterally, stopping light from penetrating its blanketing surface. This painting changes colour in time, it is a pictorial registration of the decomposing plant matter. Other paintings extend Egan's Painting Playing Cards series (2013–), which invoke a form of decorative artifice introduced to the back of the formerly blank playing card in the nineteenth century to address a social epidemic of card cheating. Asparation Frieze produces a painting of architectural proportions, which cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one vantage, always gesturing to the peripheral. Egan’s written text works produce a meta-fictional space in which the concerns of the paintings criss-cross in a succession of mental images.

Discussion with the artist at 1pm Saturday 31 January 2015.

‘The Czech Magnate, a circular’, a radio play written by Mark von Schlegell ‘in the service of David Egan’, was produced especially for the occasion of this exhibition. It will be performed and recorded live in the central gallery at Gertrude Contemporary on the evening of Tuesday 10 March 2015.

David Egan, b. 1989, lives and works as an artist in Melbourne. He graduated from a BA in Fine Art, Curtin University, 2011 and a BA in Fine Art (Honors), Monash University, 2013. Solo exhibitions include: Underground Museum Tactic, St Heliers Street Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Painting Playing Cards, Substation, Melbourne, 2014; Plantings, Adult Contemporary, Perth, 2014; The Yellow Curtain, Institute of Jamais Vu, London, 2012; The unknown by the more unknown, OK Gallery, Perth, 2012; and Seria Ludo, Galleria, Perth, 2011. Group exhibitions include: BLOOD, SUGAR, SEX, MAGIC, Slopes, Melbourne, 2014; Hire a magician to speak on your behalf, he is a great entertainer and the audience is blown away, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne, 2013; and Wilderness Years, OK Gallery, Perth, 2011. Egan has undertaken artist residencies at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2012; Fremantle Arts Centre, 2012; and Amstel 41, Amsterdam, 2013. He has also worked collaboratively with Patrick Miller as Natural Mystery, which existed as an exhibition and project space in their shared residential garage in Perth, 2011–12. Their program culminated with an exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre, 2013, titled Magical Signs: Exchange and Utopia, that ran alongside the publication of a compendium of the same name.

Media release here.