23 April - 17 May 2025

front gallery

Aaron Perkins
Fruit/berry/herb: an irregular plural

Statement 

‘Banananana’ poses an absurdist argument against the insensitivity and inattentiveness to difference characteristic of contemporary social and political discourse.

In a botanical sense, the banana is a berry that grows upon a herbaceous flowering plant with a false stem rather than a trunk. This singularly diverse fruit/berry/herb has a similarly contradictory place within art, possessing still-life, phallic, phallocentric, feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, colonial, capitalist, neo-liberal and post-colonial conceptual flavours.

Taking the false botanical stem of the banana plant as a false linguistic stem, the work suggests that for each banana additional to the singular ‘banana’, a further ‘-na’ is appended. Through this alternative grammatical numbering system that denies the generalising plural, the banana is held out as an absurd symbol of nuance that playfully points towards the sensitivity and attention necessary for productive and respectful social and political discourse.

Artist Bio

Aaron Perkins is a Naarm-based artist with a conceptual text-based visual arts practice that explores the role of language within self-narrative and knowledge acquisition through strategies of wordplay and orthographic abstraction.

Perkins has a keen interest in literature and holds a Doctorate of Philosophy for his research into the potential of fiction within contemporary painting. He has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Naarm, Meanjin, and Auckland; has been a finalist in the Omnia, Redland, Elaine Bermingham, Sunshine Coast, and Moreton Bay Region art prizes; and has contributed interviews and catalogue texts for various ARIs and other text-based artists.