“Contents”
Julian Aubrey Smith
27 Jan → 18 Feb 2012

Through painting, Julian Aubrey Smith explores box displays as tableaux of Enlightenment knowledge and its deconstruction: the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, ‘the memory machine’, dioramas and Joseph Cornell’s boxes all combine interesting objects in a suggestive way. In these paintings, the hierarchy of objects is subverted through contexts that are fractured and disparate. Contents uses a collage-like process of sourcing various component images and objects and combining them to form the rudiments of a scene. These works investigate the language of representation—with photorealism and traditional illusionism attempting communication.