ANTHONY WHITE – CROSSING THE RUBICON
2016-09-05By merging contemporary forms of urban landscape and his Australian heritage across disciplines of drawing, painting, and collage the artist creates works often characterised by an awareness of surface and a preoccupation with the engagement of physicality and the found object. In his new body of work, Crossing the Rubicon, White continues to excavate ideas sourced from defining moments in history and their intersection with current global socio-political issues, to inform his contemporary image making practice. The exhibition explores collision points of the effects of modernism, war and globalisation.
The title Crossing the Rubicon draws from an important moment in the history of Western civilization, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river in Italy in 49AD and changed the genesis of modern Europe. Metaphorically White draws from this epoch of history in relation to the current global refugee crises, reflecting impacts in the artist’s current home, Europe, and contrasting this with the quieter crisis in his native Australia with its off-shore detention centres on the Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru.
In the work Sanguine (Manus) the Australian policy of immigration is scrutinised. Its Pacific ‘solution’ to processing of refugees is proposed as a national tragedy and international embarrassment, and an inhumane series of ongoing incidents for Australia in an international context.
Opposite – Sanguine (Manus), 2016
Exhibition runs through to September 30th, 2016
Nanda/Hobbs Contemporary
Level 1, 66 King Street
NSW 2000
Sydney
Australia
