A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Alex Gawronski, Last One Left, 2025

Ethan Frome, Camperdown, NSW

(Timber, ply-wood, paper, plastic, cloth, glass, perspex, tape, digital prints, t-shirt, books, torch, digital tablet, headphones, backpack, photographs, water bottle, various foods)

In art, there is a fundamental tension between what is present/ed and the generally unseen political, socio-material circumstances that enable an artwork to come into existence. What is seen is also a question of the structural interplay between the concealed and revealed. This tension is never more apparent than under circumstances of institutional and societal censure. Such censure today has not been as evident since the days of cold war McCarthyist hysteria over the supposed threat of Communism. Now hysteria has migrated to fallout ensuing from the hypocrisy of the West’s active support for Israel’s ongoing, profoundly evident, genocide of Palestinians.

The new ‘Communists’ – many of whom are in fact leftists, unsurprisingly – are those who fight to expose what is actually happening, its historical underpinnings as well as its widest geopolitical implications. An entire censorial cultural and media apparatus has been deployed to protect the Western settler-colonial enterprise. Hauled into the light, the ‘show-ers’ are regularly targeted violently in efforts to intimidate them into taking flight or hiding. A target attempts to elude actual and symbolic annihilation. An artist tries to hide behind other images that do not implicate them in the carnage generated by the system that (barely) supports them. No matter, the unseen exposed at this level cannot simply be put back behind the image. It will continue to explode into consciousness even as those opportunistically banking on the status quo repeatedly deny it.

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