GORAN TOMIC

showing until 3 May 2009

Goran Tomic says of his art: "I am a visual collisionist. Just as a DJ samples sounds and collides them together, I do this visually.  Sometimes it is chaotic or manic, other times serene...Most people perceive my work as street art, but this is not true. My work IS the street. It’s the actual skin and fibre of the city."

Goran describes the ethos of his art making as embracing a kind of gritty underbelly of an urban environment – capturing that intuitive aesthetic mark that is layered and abstracted over time as posters, advertising and graffiti meld with the pace of our daily existence. These two pieces shown in SLOT are from a new body of collages that are constructed by removing posters and gig-wraps from telegraph poles. They are injected with new energy that plays off association. They look like contemporary art and one can easily read their connections to abstraction and artists such as the American Robert Rauschenberg or Australia’s Rosalie Gascoigne for their use of found materials. What Goran does, like these artists, is isolate and elevate the everyday object, injecting it with a vibrancy and pulse in sync with the pace of the city. We become blurred to the proliferation of urban ‘poster art’ that surrounds us, like another honking horn or siren ricocheting through the city. But, in the hands of Goran, it is permitted a timelessness that elevates it to the tag ‘art’.

Coinciding with Goran’s SLOT exhibition is “Oncoming Traffic” at the Sheffer Gallery - a short walking distance at 38 Lander Street, Darlington. 

This exhibition was fascilitated by the artist Mai Long.