Morphing the Idol I Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne I 1st Nov - 3rd Dec 2017

Morphing the Idol

Ian Paradine’s practice spans across many disciplines: painting, drawing, photography and video. Though despite their differing modes of presentation, each work by Paradine is permeated with a sense of powerful emotion.

Paradine challenges traditional notions of space and time and transforms them into dreamlike hybrids, between a reality we know and understand and something completely unfamiliar.

Paradine’s latest exhibition of drawings, Morphing the Idol presented at the Anna Pappas Gallery continues this exploration, employing a multitude of spectral figures to portray a deep introspection into both light and dark inner states. The figures that populate each work can be archetypal and dark, mythic and sometimes fantastical.

Numerous heads with a single body in ‘The Churning Of The Milk Ocean’ raises questions addressing a conflicted identity or existence within this abstract space. Perhaps these are numerous iterations of what is or could be, being carefully considered by the figure in the foreground. Faces and beings seemingly float around this character, vying for its attention, much like trying to recall a dream after waking. The memory splits, dissipates and rises to the surface in additional conflicting iterations. Who am I? Who could I be? The choice is yours.

‘Bollocked’ is a work of pensive musing. Possessing a fragmented body held together by what appears to be no more than threads, the figure is in a state of disarray, limbs are disconnected from the traditional source of sentience, the head. This is presented on a utilitarian type bed, lending itself to common depictions of psychoanalysis and modes of addressing the multifaceted layers of human consciousness.

The mind is a key theme in Paradine’s work, how it helps us perceive and experience the world, but also how it can confuse and seduce us in its varying or altered states. Morphing the Idol is a narrative examination of thought, dreaming and the in-between, presented through the guise of whimsical characters borne straight from the depths of Paradine’s imagination.

These characters ponder their own cosmic existence while referencing the world we currently reside in. Using colour and form to collapse the conscious and subconscious mind, Morphing the Idol is a unique portrayal of the intricacies within our collective psyche.


Alex Walker

October 2017