Hackable Animals

Good Grief Studios, 2020

Neil Haddon, Robert O'Connor, & Megan Walsh:

Modernism is characterised by artists working in isolation. In the past, artisans often belonged to a guild, rather than working in seclusion. To this end, Haddon, O’Connor, and Walch have formed their own guild: The Painters Guild of Hobart (not to be confused with the Hobart Guild of Painters).

Over eight months, the three artists have worked on large-scale paintings, periodically swapping the ten canvases through their studios and responding to what the previous artist had produced. Haddon, O’Connor, and Walch have hacked one another’s skills, guided by a loose rubric: each painted a ground, then passed it on - so all three took turns on the one canvas.

The ten paintings in this exhibition are works in progress. The three artists have orchestrated a collision of approaches; a black hole of content, to disrupt the preferences and outcomes that each artist might habitually make. The three artists gleefully undermine their own haphazard rules, creating disruption and schism that hacks comfortable practice; or the algorithms of artistic predictability. If painting is a form of subjective expression that embodies the artist's agency, then is this medium uniquely humanistic in relation to digital media?

In this first stage of the project there are no conclusions, only propositions: left suspended, un-stretched, pinned, taped, with notations in the margins.

To finish a painting might be to kill it. And who, of the three, would be willing to make that call? Acts of erasure, defacement and alteration are equal motivations to marking territory – to the narcissism of “I Woz Here.”