My work deals largely with the concept of 'Speculative History' and duality. Here we see Artemis, in a monster form pieced together by those symbols we commonly see proliferated in ways usually reserved for the gods to which we attach so much devotion. She is the preserver of youth but dually the Goddess of the Crossways. An awful Divinity.
Courtesy of Galerie pompom
Philjames casts a cool eye over the cultural detritus of our Disney-fied culture and remakes it with an unnerving new power. Old school cultural icons tool up to take on the complacent certainties of the sanitised world with extra powers to tear and rip their old certitudes. Whilst cartoon time favourites time-shift themselves, faded bucolic landscapes find re-energised meanings in their new deployment.
Philjames studied at the National Art School and is represented by Galerie pompom, who are staging one of three 2017 solo exhibitions, at Carriageworks Sydney for the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. Numerous other solo and group exhibitions over the last decade have meant his art has been viewed everywhere from Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art and Christchurch's Space in New Zealand, to the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing where he also took up a residency in 2010. Philjames was a finalist in The Blake Prize and is included in private collections across Australia as well as the Artbank, BlueScope Steel and Shepparton Art Museum collections.
press-moulded Jingdezhen porcelain, on-glaze fired
45 x 35 x 28 cm
Finalist
Judges of the 2017 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize: Djon Mundine OAM (Curator, Writer, Artist and Activist), Roslyn Oxley OAM (Gallerist and arts benefactor) and Alexie Glass-Kantor (Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney and Curator, Encounters, Art Basel | Hong Kong).
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