'Asymmetric Archaelogy' brings together three contemporary artists whose practices incorporate elements of chaos and distortion when interpreting the urban landscape. Patrick Cremin, William McLean and Aedan Lee act as archaeologists as they dig up and interpret the world around them through personal fragmented lenses to restructure, dissect and understand their environments. The works correlate not only in their aesthetic, being exclusively rendered in tonal black and whites, but also in their analytical framework which seeks truth in the apparent bedlam of the man-made habitat.
Aedan Lee employs painting, sculpture and photography in order to understand the world around him, whilst also paying homage to the often overlooked elements of everyday existence. Lee's black and white geometric abstractions warp with a certain compositional density and offer a cropped reality inspired by road work and construction. Over the past 10 years Lee has exhibited work both locally and internationally, started the subversive media outlet 'Pil Press' and was a founding member of the Online Zine Org, a group which seeks to encourage and facilitate publishing & independant culture in Sydney.
Patrick Cremin is a multi-disciplinary artist. His practice explores contemporary states of dread and conflict through painting, photography and sculpture. In his new series of paintings and drawings, Cremin explores the psychology of urbanised space. His abstracted ruinous and barren landscapes are littered with monuments, archways, stairwells, fences and gates; a wasteland of archetypal features of the urbanised landscape. These architectural forms are fragmented and reconstructed within Cremin's work to reflect the anxiety and paranoia that gives rise to defensive architecture and simultaneously pervades urban space.
The drawings in Will McLean's new body of work begin their life at 12:30 pm each day as he trudges the four blocks from his office to Harmony Park in Surry Hills. There, he takes out his Staedtler Mars Lumograph black 8b pencil, removes his jacket, loosens his tie, rolls up his shirt sleeves and furiously draws the other lunch goers before he is too badly sunburnt to continue or his lunch break is up. The park is next to the Surry Hills Police Centre so sometimes he draws that, sometimes he draws the trees. Each drawing brings him new knowledge of the media and the subject, bringing him ever closer to the ultimate piece of art (ever created in one lunchtime in Harmony Park). In the evenings after his family has gone to bed, he places a 56 x 76cm sheet of Saunders Waterford Hot Pressed paper on a masonite board and whilst listening to radio dramatisations he enlarges the sketch from earlier in the day with the same pencil. This repeated process of using a subjective representation as the source material for another continually removes the artwork away from realism and towards what the observations truly seek to present.