Exhibits,
Michael Ciavarella Perception Management
Opening: Opening Wednesday 30 August, 6-8pm Dates: 30 August – 23 September![](https://busprojects.org.au/media/pages/program/perception-management/87407622d6-1511078688/micheal-ciavarella-perception-management-005-bus-projects-1200x1200.jpg)
Jean-Francois Millet’s 1857 painting ‘The Gleaners’, depicts three figures bent over collecting bits of grain left in a field following the harvest. Millet and others heralded the arrival of Realism, discarding the Romanticism/Classicism that had dominated European Art in the 19th Century; mythological subject matter was replaced by the ‘real’.
This exhibition consists of paintings of people doing things. The source material comes largely from found images – second hand books and magazines - gleaned from the discarded, leftover detritus of our predominately digital, image-based culture. The paintings attempt to grapple with what it means to make representational/figurative paintings a century and a half after the beginning of Realism. How can meaning be generated through painting? The paintings deploy ambiguity, uncertainty and humour, with a sense of failure and the absurd.
Michael Ciavarella is a Melbourne based artist. He graduated from the Victorian College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2006. He has exhibited locally and internationally including at Te Tuhi, Auckland, Westspace, TCB art inc and Margaret Lawrence Gallery.
Documentation by Christo Crocker.
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