Stuart Spence

Truro

8 April — 17 April 2021

1960
Lives and works in Sydney

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Truro

Cape Cod, on the east coast of the USA, is a curious place. Atmospherically distinctive, its inhabitants are an intoxicating mix of personas—people born from the puritanical founding fathers through to the latter day Kennedy clan’s Camelot mythology. It is in this place, with its long shadows and brooding coastline that seaside towns like Truro would come to epitomise an American east coast ideal. Its notoriety for a gothic sensibility was embodied through the mid-century paintings of Edward Hopper. His was eponymous image-making with a beautiful unease about it. There is a tension and anticipation that pervades throughout his work. Light and dark dance to a melancholic tune. It is this aesthetic context that provides the genesis of Stuart Spence’s photographic and video installation, Truro—an exquisite document of human delusion, lost love and paranoia.

A bowerbird of human emotions, Spence is an artist who bounds between genres and mediums. His is a career that has seen the morphing of imagery and ideas into a narrative that delves deep into the elemental nature of living. In this exhibition—his first at Nanda\Hobbs—the tide keeper is the central protagonist in the video work set in the 1930’s. He is escaping a war that he could no longer participate in—for him, the destruction of his fellow men was too much to bare. The cost of his absconding is the loss of all that he loves. The tide keeper finds solace at the end of a pier of broken dreams, a bottle and the measurement of tide heights. He has kept his demons at bay for years, documenting the one thing that man cannot control—the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull. Now, the tide keeper awaits his seemingly impending and inevitable fate at the hands of the authorities. His loves and losses replayed in his head in an ever-increasing haze of fleeting imagery. Beauty dissolves into delusion. Fragmentation of a life rewoven in his isolation. It is in this moment that the artist is at his finest—fragmented glimpses are drawn from contemporary images, recontextualised and embedded in his narrative.

Spence’s fervent mind and skilled hand bends light, words and sound to his effervescent will. And so it is with the photographic works—captured in a lens with a neo-impressionistic fervour—the grain of the image, in effect, becomes pointillist in nature. The noiresque sensibility is all encompassing.

Spence makes melancholy desirable. The fleeting moments of a documenter of life that digs below the surface to reinvent meaning in this world—or rather, perhaps he unearths what was really there to begin with.  

Ralph Hobbs
April 2021

 

\ Exhibition featured works

Stuart Spence

...and the horse you rode in on

2008 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 63 x 63cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Edward's Cape

2016 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 45.5 x 92.5cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Fallin' Back in

2005 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ Framed size: 111 x 168cm \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Honolulu

Cotton rag archival pigment print \ Edition of 8 \ Framed size: 110.8 x 168.2cm

Stuart Spence

I'm glad you can make it, baby

2013 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ Image size: 105 x 105cm \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Lure

2014 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 63 x 49cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Primitive (In Ink)

2009 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 63 x 63cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Sea Fog (and the flight of charlie manners)

2007 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 63 x 63cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

The Greatest Show on Earth

2008 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ Framed size: 111 x 168cm \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

The Slow Road Home

2014 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 63 x 63cm framed \ Edition of 8

Stuart Spence

Time and tide

2021 \ Video - Click on link under essay to view \ 7:47 mins \ Edition of 3

Stuart Spence

Under Cover

2008 \ Cotton rag archival pigment print \ 43 x 42.7cm framed \ Edition of 8

\ Installation Image

Stuart Spence

\ Installation Image

Stuart Spence

\ Installation Image

\ Other exhibitions

Hubert Pareroultja

"When the rain tumbles down in july"

21 March — 6 April 2024

PEOPLE,

Group Exhibition

29 February — 16 March 2024

Jonathan Dalton

MELBOURNE ART FAIR

22 February — 25 February 2024

Contact Us

to find out more about Truro.

12 - 14 Meagher Street Chippendale, NSW 2008
Opening Hours
Monday to Friday, 9.00am - 5.30pm Saturday, 11am - 4pm Closed Public Holidays (and Easter Saturday)