BACK GALLERY: GEMMA WESTON (WA) -DESKTOP PUBLISHER

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 6th December

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Running - 7th - 23rd December 2017

Desktop publisher is a poem written in clipart. It explores the deep truth of the cliché. It works through its emotions in the craft aisles of Spotlight. It leaves a cartoon flower with a sad face scribbled on A4 copy paper on a co-worker’s keyboard. Under the flower it says: ‘I’m sorry’ and it says ‘I’m fine’. It read your diary but only by accident, it just fell open on that page. It is desperate to tell you but can’t find the words. It is some drawings and some writing and it is a shadow dance and a sleight of hand magic trick and an ICQ message written in code sent from the family computer, back when it was kept in the living room, in 1998. Uh oh.

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Gemma Weston is an artist based in Perth, Western Australia. She makes drawings and sculptures that meditate on, inhabit or perpetuate the behaviours and emotions of adolescence, among other things. Recent projects include the solo exhibition Beside Myself at Moana Project Space, Perth, WA, and the curated exhibitions Locale (2017, Heathcote Museum and Gallery, Perth WA), Bedshed, (2016, 7UP, Melbourne, VIC) and Major Tender (2016, CACSA, Adelaide SA), She is sometimes known as Gemma Watson and is also one third of Pet Projects, a collaboration that operated as a gallery space in Bayswater, WA from 2016 – 2017 and recently exhibited in looking at me through you at Campbelltown Art Centre, NSW. In adult life she is Curator of the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia and a published writer on contemporary Australian art. 

Photography by Steph Fuller