"HOME SWEET HOME"
Exhibition
Exhibition
“I’m drawn to something fugitive and just beyond reach, at once known and yet taking on a new form or face - often literally. A familiar made unfamiliar... Perhaps, I wonder, is it me who has changed? Or just what is this strange new world around me?” - Nic Ives
Emerging from a period of heightened creativity and personal change, moving between studios and shifting home spaces, this new body of work from artist Nic Ives marks a rich chapter of instinctive, fluid making. Derived from details of daily life and drawn from narratives mundane and familiar, the paintings he has produced adopt a kind of poetic, magical realism to explore figures and tropes that are perhaps rooted in the subconscious. There is something speculative about them, not only in their subversion of the ‘normal’ and “perversion of the nostalgic” as the artist describes the play with painting tropes, but also in their uncanny gaze toward the audience and Ives himself. In this moment of half-realisation they seem caught between worlds and selves, suspended in the act of becoming or un-becoming. Working quickly with paint and leaving surfaces unfinished and narratives open-ended, Ives tenderly commits to this process, letting his state of being guide the work and infusing it with the poetry of the moment. The resulting works feel like intimate, curious vignettes of a bizarre domestic landscape. Though perhaps they are better described as capturing the feeling of being in-between, but not without a sense of home.
Photography by;
Annika Kafcaloudis
