Artist Paul Davies has a new an exhibit at Sydney, Australia’s OLSEN Gallery featuring original paintings and digital collages on which he’s been working for the past three years. “Everything Loose Will Land In LA” opens today August 30th and runs through September 17th.
Paul Davies’ Everything Loose Will Land In LA
These paintings were initially part of a site-specific installation at RM Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House, now MAK Center’s public museum space, after attempting to rent it out short-term, in the Hollywood Hills.
“In a moment of realization, it was the Eucalyptus Trees, strangely dotted throughout Los Angeles, that revealed a connection between my adopted home in Los Angeles, California and my native home in Sydney, Australia” – Paul Davies
Paul’s revelation led to this series of paintings with a double title “Everything Loose Will Land In LA/Double Golden Gully”
The artist explains that the phrase “Everything Loose Will Land In Los Angeles” is a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright who described L.A. as a center-less sprawl of buildings and billboards. “Double Golden Gully” refers to an unused golden mining location in New South Wales, Golden Gully. The word “double’ is added to suggest a gambling term rather than a place, infused with the notion of instant luck and risk.
Attracted to the shared experiences between Australia and California, such as the Gold Rush and the exporting of Gum trees, the artist drew parallels from these two venues and expressed them within these works, simultaneously creating juxtaposition and harmony.
The Paintings
Within the exhibit, several of Davies’ paintings contain the same modern architectural structures, placed within different environments, such as Palm Spring’s Horizon Hotel (now called L’Horizon Resort & Spa).
The work below, ‘Untitled’, features the Fitzpatrick-Leland House in which Davies had his recent site specific installation at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture:
The Double Golden Gully works look at the relationship between California and Australia through the lens of photography and painting. Reflecting on the notion of Hollywood’s Silver Screen, the artist applies silver pigment to many of the scenes. He likens this to the hopeful actor, artist or director, the paint shining more intensely as it’s viewed at greater angles.
The painting below “Everything Loose Will Land in LA/Double Golden Gully 4” has been acquired by The Crocker Art Museum as part of their prestigious permanent collection.
Other paintings in the exhibit feature modern architectural facades and swimming pools.
Digital Collage Prints
The exhibit also contains twelve limited editions of Davies’ numbered digital composition prints entitled “We Tell Ourselves Stories.” Measuring 47 x 33 cm, the prints combine painting with photography and play with positive and negative space by layering imagery from his works. The results have a feel of both process and progress.
Davies was recently awarded recipient of the 2017 Chippendale World Art Residency in Provence.
You can view the entire exhibition online here
About the Artist (from OLSEN Gallery):
Paul Davies is an Australian-born, Los Angeles-based artist whose work is driven by friction between opposing forces of built and natural environments, design and art, abstraction and figuration. These boundaries and relationships are illustrated through Davies’ process, which combines painting, stenciling, photography and sculpture.
In this era of surveillance, Davies repeats and collages facades of modern architecture, the neutrality of which blurs what is revealed and concealed. Sighting the manner in which information is often reiterated, Davies employs stencils, hand cut and derived from the artist’s own digital photographs. These are then applied in various mediums to render uncertain what is original and reproduction.
Davies recently completed a residency at The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Phoenix and work from this is now in the permanent collection of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, he was awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Davies was featured with Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig in essay “Limbo Architecture – Painters of Modernism” by Aaron Betsky, Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006 – 2014), for the May 2014 edition of Architecture Review. Davies has been included in ‘Public Trust: It’s About What We Do’ and ‘The Kindness of Strangers: Recent Acquisitions and Conservation Projects’ both at the SMOCA, ‘Condition Reports’ curated by Ranjit Hoskote for India Art Fair, McClelland Collection’ at the McClelland gallery + Sculpture Park. His work is held in several public and corporate collections such as the Macquarie University, Maitland Regional Gallery, Historic Houses Trust, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Artbank, Geelong Gallery, Rothschild, Kerry Stokes collection, Strickland, and published in prestigious magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, Art & Australia, W Magazine online, Wallpaper online, the Australian Financial Review and Blouin Artinfo. Davies has a Masters by research at the University of New South Wales – Art and Design, Australia.
Earlier work by Paul Davies
Paul Davies
Everything Loose Will Land In LA
OLSEN Gallery
August 30th – September 17, 2017
all images and information courtesy of the artist and OLSEN gallery
Paul Davies on Facebook