Graeme Thompson: Alchemy|Play|Art

Opening in the Small Dog Gallery
Saturday 15 February 2 – 3.30pm

Graeme Thompson is a mixed media conceptual artist who grew up in Pukemaori, Western Southland, on a small farm within sight of Fiordland.  His mixed media assemblage works have a heaping, helping, handful of surrealism and symbolism, topped with a sweet layer of humour and mordant wit. He uses toys and found objects to engage the unconscious of the viewer in a psychological, alchemical transfiguration of the base materials into alternative (and adjoining) realities of play and art.

Thompson’s exhibition, Alchemy|Play|Art, is a journey of exploration with his inner child into his country upbringing; American foreign policy, religion, and the Wittgensteinian position that art cannot objectively represent subjective experience … and it is all wrapped up in a lot of fun.

“I like putting jokes into my mixed media artworks, and they’re all fun, even the serious stuff, and they swing wildly between the Symbolist, Surrealist, and Marx Brothers areas of the art spectrum. One piece – named ‘Misrepresentational Table’ – is, literally, a 14 kilogram wooden table top hung on the wall!”
– Graeme Thompson

View Graeme’s exhibition catalogue here.