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October 20, 2010
Glenn Sloggett's colour photography (done with an old Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera) is structured around Melbourne's suburbia. This is a suburbia that is down-at-heel and Sloggett explores the dereliction, failed aspiration and abject domesticity.
Glenn Sloggett, Hound, from Playgrounds 1998-2004
There is also a quirky humour at work in Glenn Sloggett's photographs of suburban Melbourne that has expresses affection for the neglected, dysfunctional and the out of date. It's a world of failed hopes and abandoned dreams.
Glenn Sloggett, Picket Fence, from Lost Man, 2003
Robert Cook, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, says that lows us to start to think about the suburbs we live in as places not just where art might be made, but as places to stay, rather than escape. He adds:
He brings the drift and float of suburban time into the structures of contemporary art, therefore, not as a glib spectacle, yet another in a line of minor transgressive episodes, but as part of the experience of being fully human. It is, therefore, a highly structured addition to the history of humanist realism that includes both literature and the visual arts.
The experience of the suburbs expressed in art. I recall the painter Howard Arkley and the shopping trolley opera photos of Matthew Sleeth.
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