Distance presents a collection of paintings by Flinders-based artist Neil Williams. Mediating between the romantic ideal of rural living in simpler times, and the barren isolation that went along with it, the exhibition forges a dialogue between past and present to pose questions about the future.
Exploring the infinite possibilities cast forward in our minds when we look back through the lens of nostalgia, the works evoke the tyranny of physical and chronological distance, portraying figurative visual narratives featuring historical architectural remnants often nestled within idyllic rural landscapes. Isolated built structures take on an air of storied exile, existing as vessels for collected memories and the long-faded minutiae of post-colonial life. Rendered in oil and recognisable by their familiar pitched rooflines and simplistic compositions against expansive skies of brooding stratus clouds, the buildings challenge us to imagine the lives carried out within their walls, almost like we are looking through a portal onto days gone by to unearth answers about where we came from and why today's lifestyle patterns are what they are.
Having grown up at an in-between time - long after those early settlers who first lived on and cultivated the Peninsula's natural landscape but before the influx of the digitised social age - Neil harbours a fascination for the interconnected relationship between what came before and what is yet to come. His paintings seek to reconcile past and future through sentimental illustrations that exist outside of time, framing snapshots of places, moments apart from chronology, places that serve as reminders that we are all here for such a fleeting moment but the gossamer link that stretches through time, from ancestor to ancestor, can remain strong, vital and bound to the bricks and mortar of the places we inhabit.
Download Exhibition Catalogue below:
