Swallow Vomit
Killing Jar
Labour Outbreak
Greg Creek | Image via Shepparton Art Museum
GREG CREEK
Melbourne, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
Greg Creek is an Australian artist who has presented group and individual exhibitions in Australia, the UK, Europe and Asia, and has been the recipient of numerous residencies, commissions and art prizes.
His practice represents a political perspective on personal and public histories. He weaves re-imagined spectral figures, ruptured domestic and industrial architectures, and ideas from speculative fiction into allegories of contemporary experience. His large paintings manifest ideas in various ways using tonalist forms, painterly stains and scumbles, saturated, compositional color, and screen-printed body fragments in abstracted, tenebrous architectures. Light and darkness is used expressively and symbolically, creating an atmosphere of anxiety in which figures and landscapes perturb one another. In the work Killing-Jar painting fragments emerge from a densely layered suburban exterior space of the artist's childhood home, and bear witness to the intensity of a household breakdown.
In Swallow-Vomit painting glowing phone-like advertising panels at an elevated platform face off; one screen bearing a fragmented gaping-mouth transfiguring the other, which is purged or penetrated. In Labour-Outbreak painting in an industrial space a shapeshifter figure looms from gas-like pigmented stains, behind which a prominent woman and a masked man appear. The women make mirrored hand gestures from a Kathe Kollwitz etching. Each picture bears witness to the entanglements of contemporary cultures and the complexities of transformation, identity and the nature of representation itself.