Consequence: Tom Gerrard

The recent body of work focuses on the daily minutia of anonymous characters as they go about their daily lives.

The sheer amount of detail contained within the paintings gives a nod to Tom’s engagement with Street Art. The ubiquitous hypermasculine heads, balding yet heavily moustachioed, would be familiar to the viewers (either spray-painted, stencilled, or as stickers) from Melbourne’s laneways and train stations, as well as from a recent installation at the celebrated Attica restaurant, in Ripponlea. In a similar vein, most of the objects within the paintings are silhouetted in black, applied with confidence directly from a spray can or with an air brush.

However, it is the artist’s ode to suburbia which differentiates this exhibition from earlier bodies of work. The ubiquitous faces that line suburban laneways are now interspersed with the equally ubiquitous suburban detritus: abandoned couches, broken window frames, faded umbrellas, lengths of rope, coils of wire, and proliferation of pot plants, discarded by the previous owners and reclaimed by nature.

As if illustrating the idiom ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’, Gerrard documents the journey of these objects from laneways and nature strips into people’s living rooms, where, cleaned, polished—and watered—the ‘reclaimed’ pieces of furniture, interior décor, and greenery are given another lease of life.

The paintings echo Tom’s own journey from an internationally acclaimed street artist to the artist who is increasingly embraced by the institutional and private collectors, and whose once ephemeral artworks are making their way, from streets and laneways, into homes, offices, and galleries.

Consequence is remarkable for Tom’s renewed focus on the intersection between Street Art and Pop Art, the art movement that also strove to elevate the everyday. The motif of paintings within paintings is a nod to the established Old Master tradition of placing a narrative within a narrative. The visible evidence of mark-making (spills, splatters, drips, and pooled paint, applied from an aerosol can or an airbrush), as well as Gerrard’s focus on suburbia, trace a direct lineage from Howard Arkley, another artist who iconised Melburnian suburbia through the medium of vibrantly-coloured spray paints.