THIRTY-year-old artist Nathan Beard does not think his career trajectory warrants him being featured as the first WA Focus artist for 2017 but those at Art Gallery of WA believe otherwise.
The 2010 Curtin University graduate has mainly exhibited in Bangkok and Sydney and said he was grateful to have the opportunity to show his deeply personal works at home.
“A lot of my work deals with the fact I have a Thai mother and Australian father,” Beard said.
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READ NOW“It’s about picking apart this idea of culture that’s inherited and creatively dealing with a slippage between the two forms of identity; using a range of mediums and materials to communicate.”
Central to the exhibition are a haunting series of portraits, mainly of deceased relatives, found in his mother’s abandoned home in Nakhon Nayok, Thailand.
Beard has embellished the photographs with crystals, taking inspiration from a range of different sources including Thai folk drawings, Thai silk patterns, fashion runway influences and mobile phone covers.
“It’s about pixelating those different designs and then reapplying them to these found photographs; this idea of encountering biography or legacy of family history and wanting to use a detailed driven process to build a relationship there,” he said.
“No one had been in the house for about 20 years and getting to see everything on the walls was like entering into a time capsule; it was an eerie displacement of time.
“One of the pictures is of my mum when she was quite young and my maternal grandmother who I don’t remember much about apart from her funeral.
“I was confronted by these decades of history that have been collapsed and then used that abandoned house site as a creative inspiration.”
The WA Focus exhibition shows until May 28 with a free artist talk on Saturday, April 8 at 3pm.
Beard said the talk would be a good opportunity for self-reflection and looked forward to fielding lots of questions.
THE ESSENTIALS
What: WA Focus – Nathan Beard
Where: Art Gallery of WA
When: showing until May 28
Entry: free