Declan Monaghan
Digital Landscapes
1 May - 12 May 2024
G2
Opening Night
Friday 3 May | 6 - 8pm
◼︎
Digital Landscapes is a series of abstract prints. Works play with colour, texture and repetition to create interpretive vignettes and glimpses of abstract ‘landscapes’. Every landscape is free-form and subjective, inviting the audience to find their own meanings.
Digital Landscapes’ most important expressive language is bright, bold colour and form. By altering orientation, colour and composition, the artist uses and reuses the same plates to create entirely new forms. In interpreting each work, consideration should be given to the interplay between shapes, composition and, perhaps most importantly, colour. In this manner, audiences become the lens through which new landscapes emerge. In choosing colours, the artist has chosen dynamic palettes that reflect the vibrancy of our natural environment. Colour also reinforces broader thematic distinctions between natural and digital processes. For instance, while colours have been mixed by hand, every title includes a specific hex triplet. These unique identifying codes, used in digital printing and design, are a subtle reference that further underscores and blurs boundaries between ‘natural’ and ‘constructed’ frameworks.
Like code, the works literally branch off from one another – creating a cluster of form and colour, discernible both individually and at scale. Overall, the scale of the works in the exhibition vary; some are whole landscapes, whereas others are glances or vignettes of a larger whole.
Digital Landscapes combines elements of different printmaking practices, including both digital and analogue techniques. The artist uses a photographic etching process to transfer each image onto an individual copper plate, which is then etched. In other words, while using digitally constructed images, each work is printed by hand. In another manual process, each plate has been printed with hand-mixed inks. These methods bring different and distinct characteristics to the final works; grainy texture/s and imperfections juxtaposed against clean lines and shapes. This hybrid technique strengthens the themes of the series, helping to produce landscapes that seem familiar yet foreign. At the same time, this method reinforces that these 'digital landscapes’ are reproduced physically and with natural materials.
Artist Info
Declan Monaghan is an emerging artist from Melbourne/Naarm who lives and works in Wurundjeri Country. Declan is a printmaker and specialises in copperplate etching.
Declan enjoys creating contrasts in his art; his practice frequently explores relationships between analogue and digital techniques, combining photographic etching with drawing and collage.
Declan graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) at RMIT University in 2023. In late 2023, he was selected as a finalist in fortyfivedownstairs’ Emerging Artist Award. In early 2024, he completed a residency at Megalo Print Studio in Canberra – which greatly informed this series. Declan has also taken part in a group show, Corpus, exhibited at Sunshine Print Artspace.
Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au
Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map
How to get here
Tram: route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens
Melway ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets
Bus: 504 (Reid Street)
