Painting as a marker of change

Painting as a marker of change examines painting practice as an enquiry into, and marker of, ongoing change in capital based cultural economies. The production of paintings as research and their reception as constituent parts in the form of exhibition explores ideas of capriciousness and equivocality, embodying perpetual change within contemporaneity. The research is informed by relations to traditions of art practice and employs collected images, oil painting on canvas, and exhibition space and design. Robert Rauschenberg and Natalia Goncharova are examined, along with contemporary artists Jutta Koether and Juan Davila as part of a community of practice in relation to painting, uncertainty and instability. Supported by the viewpoints of theorists James Elkins, Isabelle Graw and David Joselit, the research locates painting as an unstable medium, apposite to the experience of our volatile times, with outcomes as artworks contributing to debates within the subject they examine. An investigation of the phrase `remembering and forgetting' is linked to the experience of capital economies in our current times, examined through the production and exhibition of paintings. This aspect of the research is in relation to Boris Groys' ideas that creative production forms through a continuous unfolding, correspondingly relating to the writings of Henri Bergson and Pheng Cheah concerning change and material energies. The project develops ideas of contemporaneity framed by Peter Osborne and Boris Groys as an unstable present, arranging itself in conjunction with globalisation and capitalism. It argues painting practice is affective in relation to contemporaneity when situated within a `verge space' - discernible by ideas of `coming into being', ambiguity and multiplicity both within the painting and its reception in display. Painting as a Marker of change considers (that) conscious and unconscious methods in painting can manifest uncertain, indeterminate and complex experiences of encounter. The research suggests contemporary art practices necessarily form within a spirit of flux, in a period where political and social volatilities are echoed in our images and narratives.