Megan Walch: Palingenesis
opening night, friday 6 february 5:30 - 7pm
I’ve often suspected the world is like an illusion - smoke and mirrors - a flux of junk in a continual state of transformation, a constantly morphing vivid procession of characters and components, lurching, clattering and clinking like brightly coloured nuts and bolts on an endless conveyor belt, or like nets bulging with quivering red herrings - playthings for monkey-minds.
These paintings, inspired by a visit to Rajasthan are like magic carpets woven in paint, gliding above worlds within worlds, offering map-like perspectives as patterns unravel, rewind and reform once more. Here collapse is a precursor of reconfiguration - the rug is pulled out from under us. We are reminded it is all an illusion and we are entangled like trance dancers, meat suits convulsing on invisible strings, giving form to unseen animating forces, some benign, some not; cosmic chaos, expressed through the base material of paint, transformed to a shimmer by the plinkety-plonk of oily gamelan revealing the underlying quivering incandescence of the world.
The paintings begin from the assumption that what we take to be reality is always mediated—by cognition, by systems of measurement, and by the limits of perception itself. It is an attempt to visualise not what the world is, but how it behaves when truth and observation breaks down—when order and chaos coexist, and transformation emerges from their friction. Throughout the work, instability is not framed as failure but as a generative state. Painting becomes a way of thinking - a speculative instrument - somewhere between telescope, radio receiver, and dream state- a site where uncertainty is not resolved, but held—where perception is stretched, tested, and allowed to misfire in an attempt to interpret, and locate ourselves within a universe that is fundamentally unstable, vast, and unknowable.
Megan exploits the plastic conditions of painting and drawing media to cross cultural and aesthetic boundaries of form. She is a graduate of the University of Tasmania’s School of Art and has a Masters from the San Francisco Art Institute, USA. She is a Samstag Scholar and an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Space Program, USA. Her practice has developed through spending extended periods of time living and working overseas.
Megan has undertaken residencies in Tapei and Thailand. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Australia, including Wilderness, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010, Kindle and Swag - The Samstag Effect, curated by Ross Wolfe, University of South Australia Art Museum, 2004, Artists to Artists, Ace Gallery, New York, 2002, and Primavera 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
