KEIRAN GORDON

FLORAL NIHILISM

3 – 14 NOVEMBER 2023

Public Opening Night: 6 – 8pm Friday 3rd November
Presale: From Friday 27th October

Keiran Gordon’s solo exhibition ‘Floral Nihilism’ aims to express the relationship between weightlessness and intensity; reflecting on those fleeting pleasurable feelings which are never wholly contained. Keiran’s sculptures feature marks and shapes that are an exploration into a mythology of colour, presenting an attractive and passive invitation not unlike a flower. His works are vibrant living abstracts influenced by the constant sensory bombardment of modern life, natural, built and felt.

Nihilism is a philosophy of verbs. Living, searching and attaching meaning in a fluctuating reality as you find it and not as you wish it to be. In a creative sense, you envisage what is found and the meaning instilled in it is entirely your fabrication. When this vision is made real through artistic pursuit, you have created a bridge between the found and fabricated worlds. Bound together by impermanence.

Abstraction is a primordial soup. It is the base level of bringing form to the formless, the minimum something before it is nothingness. It is an investigation of conceptual atoms and the physics of visual interaction. Abstraction can be used to break reality into its base parts, or create entire realities that exceed the boundaries of the purely physical realm.

Carcass Kokodamas are about using abstraction in its most nihilistic manner. Nihilism strips traditions, concepts and hierarchies of their immortality and by doing so makes what was once untouchable, inarguable or unassailable seem smaller, at times pathetic at other times approachable but wholly undeserving of idolisation. By combining these two concepts I use abstraction to visually break the uncomfortable concept, in this case the presence of death and decomposition. I employ the philosophic in nihilism and its visual analogue in abstraction by ‘objectifying abstraction’. Using abstraction to unravel a seemingly immovable and undesirable concept and rebuilding it with a full spectrum of colour and shape, reanimating the broken concept in an imbued object.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Originally from the Blue Mountains now Sydney based, Keiran Gordon received his BFA from National Art School, majoring in sculpture. Experimenting primarily in painting and mixed media, Keiran has been exhibiting his work in solo and group shows since 2014. Keiran was recently a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize 2021 and the 67th Blake Prize.

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