Symbols of the Dreaming from the Chaos Void

Went to the launch of an exhibit at the Belconnen Gallery in the
surprising named Belconnen Community Centre .

The exhibit was of a young artist by the name of Joabie Lovett. As
described by Professor Margot Neale (ANU), in her opening remarks, his
work has a singularity and integrity which one often fails to see
these days. There is a sense of the work being done for the pleasure
of the artist. Here we must pause for a moment to understand and
describe the pleasure of life as being the understanding and self
expansion of the self. So to rephrase the sentence. There is the
feeling that the work is being done for the personal understanding and
expansion of the artist. This seems to be a prime motive.

This is to be commended. There is no pandering to market or public
fads. The work itself can be described as a catalouge of a spirtual
journey. This is a wide ranging and catholic journey. Striding over
Buddihst, Christan, Hebrew, Egyptian, Hindu and of of course
Indigenous spirtulaity and iconography. The canvas is seen as a flat
surface for story telling (like the blank page for the poet), not so
much a mirror, or a creation of perpective illusion.

There is much to see and think about, there is much to admire. The dot
painted and cross hatched backgrounds are layered with simple yet
powerful images and painted words that extend the narrative. The use
of color was at times subtle, at other times exuberant, but never was
a unfriendly effect created.

As each of us can only speak from our experince, I was disturbed by
the godleness of the exhibit. I feel that a strong beauty and art can
be found by looking over the wide tradtion and picking the persons and
ideas that sought to free us from all idealism and into a word pure
world of nature where human history and nature again can become
one.

But that is just my personal feeling, and like the vast majority of
white people in Australia I have lived a life of relative
privilege. If anyone was to ask I would tell them to stop by the
Belconnen Gallery and judge for yourself, even if you were an old
school atheist like myself, you would find much in the exhibit to
captivate and exicte the imigination.