Blacktown City Council

SYNTHETIC SPACES | 15 June – 4 August 2007

< Adam Costenoble < ................. < Daniel Soma

78 Flushcombe Road, Blacktown
Open 10am – 5pm Tuesday – Saturday
T: 02 9839 6558
E: artscentre@blacktown.nsw.gov.au
W: www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au

Western Sydney, from its very beginning, has been based on imaginings that radically changed the local sense of place, re-defined its people and established new paradigms in the operations of culture. This was and remains a contested zone, a place where ideas clash, where landscapes transform, where peoples intermingle - everywhere the synthetic process dominates as experimental thoughts are applied and become corporeal.

Blacktown is a powerful representation of the forces at work in the region. As the grasslands of the Cumberland Plain morph into a shingled urban expanse, the collective consciousness positions contemporary Blacktown as both an imagined utopia and fabled dystopia, representing order and chaos, growth and diminishment, progress and opportunity lost. As Western Sydney grows it will continue to test the cohesion of its elements and will face the challenge of creating a new synthesis from the disparate concepts and processes at hand.

In addressing these issues, the three artists of Synthetic Spaces investigate the modulating perception and experience of real and imagined spaces.

The notion of transient spaces and identities are paramount to the work of <......... Examining the experience and influence of migrants in Western Sydney, dissects how we define being ‘Australian’, simultaneously exposing its inherent complexity and beauty.

Soma’s paintings and drawings envision a ‘faultless environment’ where everyday perfection is defined by simplicity. Soma’s utopian environments seem to defy time and space. By reducing perspective and detail, Soma creates non-descript places where isolated domestic objects bring the only sense of identity or human association.

In contrast, Costenoble references dystopian ideas to question the effect and acknowledgement of the individual within systems of growth. Exploring the opposing dual nature of progress, Costenoble forces the viewer to analyse the ramifications of action versus inaction.

From locally generated references to imagined worlds of operation, Costenoble,
< ..........and Soma explore individuality and its recognition within the many fluid spaces of Western Sydney and broader contemporary society.

John Cheeseman and Sophia Kouyoumdjian