Talking with hands that slap your face

It is pointless and misleading to argue for an Art that is contemporary from which references to the present human condition are excluded. However, it does not necessarily follow that an art which concerns itself exclusively with the representation of machine parts, space fleets and a world withering away is either progressive or new. Nevertheless, something of the modern predisposition should be materialised within an Art cognizant with time passing away.

There is a genuine and immediate need for contemporary Art practice to manifest a capacity to examine recent historical events and tendencies in a critical manner, (in order to enable it to participate more fully in forming the character and quality of life in our time). Art has a social as well as an aesthetic function, it embodies and transmits information and opinion and it is a means by which the unfamiliar or unperceived are identified and made known. 

Painting a picture is a little like sentence forming ... meaning accumulates around certain objects as they are juxtaposed. This provides access to a variety of narrative and allegorical devices through which the past and the present may be efficaciously entered, experienced and understood.

GARY CARSLEY
1985.