Artist Hayden Fowler’s Future Distant Australia

Australia’s history is the inspiration for four new exhibitions throughout Sydney in July, including Future Distant History by New Zealand-born, Sydney-based artist Hayden Fowler on at Artereal Gallery.

“Fowler is interested in revealing the disparaging truth of Australia’s colonial and industrial antiquity – as well as its lasting damage,” Sammy Preston writes for Broadsheet. “For Fowler, our landscape, people and culture continue to be exploited. Curated by Barbara Dowse, Future Distant History is deeply symbolic. In the exhibition is a set of melancholic black-and-white images of an alien, post-apocalyptic landscape. In the photographs, a crestfallen donkey is weighed down with ominous black garbage bags – the veiled but heavy burden of civilised society.

“The exhibition also includes Fowler’s powerful installation piece, Australia. Made up of sun-bleached bones cast in polymer plaster and arranged on top of an intricately carved colonial-era table. Speakers play a call-and-response cadence of cicadas.”

Fowler, 44, lectures in fine arts studio at UNSW Art & Design and at the University of Wollongong.

Future Distant History runs through 29 July.

Original article by Sammy Preston, Broadsheet, July 7, 2017.