19 May - 19 May 2024
Press Release
Catalogue Essay
Images
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GRANTPIRRIE is pleased to present Let down, an exhibition of Todd McMillan’s latest video work. Produced while on residency in Europe after winning the 2006 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship, McMillan’s video performances reflect on the absurdity of life.
McMillan’s practice is characterised by pervading melancholy and tragic comedy, achieved through his use of repetition and performance. In several works in the exhibition, McMillan is shown traversing through isolated locations on a set of crutches with a bandaged foot – an allegory for impending fall and a frailty of existence, as comical as it is sad.
The settings for McMillan’s performances evoke the monumental and mundane: a driving range overlooking Berlin, a forest on the edge of an anonymous city, a cement staircase cutting steadily upwards. The figure of the artist activates these landscapes with simple, repetitious actions. In after the mist (2007) Casper David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist (c.1818) is substituted by a lone golfer, pointlessly attempting to correct a poor swing.
McMillan makes reference to the works of Samuel Beckett, film noir, and German Romanticism in his work, utilising their inherent humour, sadness and tragedy as raw materials. McMillan plays a game of seduction with his audience – toying with truth and fiction, corruption and sincerity.
Todd McMillan has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from the Australian Catholic University, Strathfield. Solo exhibitions include: alone alone, GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney, 2005; Big Boy Blues, MOP Projects, Sydney, 2005; By the Sea, Francis Baker Smith, Sydney, 2004; and Untitled, Imperial Slacks, Sydney, 2002. Group exhibitions include: New Acquisitions 2007, MCA, Sydney, 2007; National Photography Prize, Albury Regional Art Gallery, Albury, 2007; Masquerade: Representation and the self in contemporary art, MCA, Sydney, 2006 and Fantastical…, Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2005.
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