Passivity; after 'an episode from a fight'

BACKGROUND This work contributes to the broad field of contemporary art through painting. Passivity; after 'an episode from a fight' is a painting peer-selected from a field of applicants nationally for inclusion in the Bayside Aquisitive Art Prize at the The Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre. This work examines ideas of unsettled society and the individual in relation to complex power structures, relating to the research of Simon (2013, Neomaterialism). This work also generally investigates the implications promoted by new materialist theorist Grosz (2008, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth) where materiality is seen to be content. CONTRIBUTION Painting has substantial historical precedents in relation to self-reflexivity, where questions are examined within the medium. The question of what is the nature of the iconography available to painting today in a world of uncertainty forms a concern within this research, while reinforcing the passing nature of experience. This work is also concerned with the sensory experiential implications of painting through imagery and material. This research is formed through painting in order to investigate the idiom within a dialect and through reflexivity. SIGNIFICANCE This work was awarded the 2016 major prize, judged by the Director of a Museum and acquired into the permanent collection of the Bayside Council. The painting was presented for public exhibition within a nationally recognized contemporary art space, which was visited by the general public, practitioners and theorists from the field, in turn fostering discourses around the nature of the idiom within our contemporaneity.