黑料不打烊

Lane Cormick and Raafat Ishak exchanged a number of failed drawings over a period of time, only to realise that their shared interests were less concerned with collaborative image making. Instead, Dean Barry is a convoluted and secretive homage drawn from conversations around the art school ready-made, artless Australian males, fashion and money.

Working across painting, installation and site-specific drawing, Raafat Ishak鈥檚 practice is informed by architecture and his Arabic cultural heritage. Within Ishak鈥檚 formal but understated graphic language, distinctive lines enclose curved, square or rectangular shapes that have been slowly built up in pastel shades on un-primed canvas or MDF. Ishak seamlessly mixes the personal with the political in a way that highlights the circularity and interdependency of these relationships. Underscored by a utopian, romantic tendency, his work is subtle, contemplative and alive to the nuances of cross-cultural dialogue and transit.

Lane Cormick鈥檚 work draws from a wide array of influences including the aesthetics of the industrial and functional, investigation of skill and technique, performance, music, modernist and contemporary culture. These influences feed into an art practice that is open-ended and without predictable outcome. Previous works have been created through endurance-based performance or procedure, with a commitment to impractical or unreasonable projects that test him physically and mentally, exposing the limits of his skills and the enormity of his attempts.