Hugo Michell Gallery Open: David Booth [Ghostpatrol] + Rob Howe

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of David Booth [Ghostpatrol]’s ‘Hello blue sky’ and Rob Howe’s ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ on Thursday 28th November 6-8pm.

Of Hello blue sky Booth states:

It has been ten years since I first exhibited with Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide. We use time as a marker, for obvious reasons, and this milestone has had me wondering whether I’ve spent more time in my creative place – a virtual space – than in the real world.

Hello blue sky.

The title for this new series of work stems from the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a short-lived but global thinking social movement in England throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. Led by John Hargrave and comprising writers, artists, scientists and campaigners, the Kibbo Kift espoused practices of well-being, handicraft, pacifism, teaching and philosophy across a peaceful community. Discovering their art, attitude, rituals and manifestos has had a resounding effect on me: their vision, ambition and optimism providing a source of not only of deep reflection, but action.

Hello blue sky.

I’ve collected and created this body of work over the past two years, working across different spaces, utilising new materials and returning to older mediums from my first exhibitions with the gallery as a means to make sense of this ten-year span. The series of crafted, totem-like shrine objects can be seen as echoes of guided thoughts. Artworks are bearers of secrets. Perhaps some are revealed, maybe others are shared, and many will go untold, but I am absolutely sure that stories are passed in their existence. I created these sculptural objects so that people can hold them, because frankly, that’s the best part.

Hello blue sky.

The installation shows the works almost sliding on and off the walls, as if scrolling on forever. This is, at times, what my mind feels like when I’m searching for a memory or saved image. And so I offer to you this exhibition as an invitation into my mind over a period of time, where I have looked both backwards and forwards, where you can take a moment to sit atop the green grass and find something of me in this world, me in you, you in me or you in the world. 

Hello blue sky was the Kibbo Kift’s warm welcome, and so too is it mine.

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Earlier this year footage was released of the rocket used to put spacecraft into orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida. On its return to Earth, the rocket swung itself into a vertical position and lowered itself gently onto a landing platform on an autonomous spaceport drone ship commissioned by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The name given to the vessel on which the rocket so softly landed? Of Course I Still Love You.

For the rocket returning from its mission in space, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ represents home. And for this body of work – taking as its subjects local children, houses and landscape – home is the common thread.

‘Of Course I Still Love You’ represents what I see in my vicinity, what I like to pay attention to. These are ongoing themes in my paintings of recent years – my continuing infatuation with the colours and possibilities of local suburbia.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of our final exhibitions for 2019!

Exhibition runs until December 20.

Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.