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Johns
 
 
“I paint therefore I am. I look at society in Australia and the world and I see an almost senseless desire for stuff. As said by Zorba in that famous film Zorba the Greek: "I am married, wife, children, house... The full catastrophe!" Such is life in the suburbs of Australia. They pile up the debt and buy like there is no tomorrow. The stuff piles up, then it's obsolete stuff, then it's thrown out to make room for new stuff. In my exhibition, 'Pseudo Symbolism' my subjects are mesmerized, hypnotized, engrossed by their strange manufactured objects. In some cases the objects obscure their vision but they continue to gather their strange objects with a religious fervor. Strange people in strange places holding strange objects, a metaphor for consumerism. The other part of my exhibition, I call 'Landmark Landmarks' This is a pop art look at cultural, political, religious architectural monuments to our greatness. I take a God's eye view of some of the worlds most famous architectural masterpieces. I manipulate them in my computer and then I paint the result in oil on canvas, the old and the new coming together in a fauve kind of way. They are bright, colorful tribal metaphors for our modern civilization. They say to me it doesn't matter how grand our monuments to ourselves as humans go, there is always an underlying savagery in our societies.”