Ken Singer’s paintings investigate the relationships between image, mark, and meaning. In I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You Something, colour charged abstractions are transformed from densely layered lexicons of organized marks to elaborate vibrating surfaces that synthesize form and content that verge on the subliminal.

Singer produces paintings that explore fields of intricate patterning and optical rhythms. They chart the points at which singular marks become ‘painting’, repeated marks function as language, and visual language translates into multiple meanings. Together, these paintings achieve a complex synthesis of structure, space, and movement, combining calculated compositional strategies with procedures of chance and randomness. Referencing a broad visual terrain, the work explores the intersections of topographical landscapes abstracted to the point of indecipherability, obfuscated grid systems, the associative use of colour, lyrical allegorical environments, and narratives that refer to shifting notions of home, migration and dislocation.

Several paintings in this exhibition relate directly to notions of individual belonging and the ordering of community. Now No Longer at Home, All Who Belong to the Crowd, and Nobody Here But Us present surfaces of oscillating groups of marks and shifting shapes differentiated by colour, form and depth. In relation to Abstraction’s familiar language of the monochrome, the grid, and the allover, these marks subject unified fields to pressures and constraints, the pushing and pulling of continual movements and disruptions.

With its ability to index the artist’s hand, painting has historically been the medium of authentic experience. Today, however, we are increasingly dependent on technology, and consequently our understanding of authenticity has shifted. With its well-established codes, painting is in a unique position to negotiate between immediate and mediated experience.

In Jordan Broadworth’s recent work each painting begins with fragmenting, layering and reconfiguring of artists’ signatures resulting in a compound signature that provides a gestural source, which Broadworth positions against a loose structure of horizontal lines and grids. At first glance, the paintings appear to be fluid, but further study reveals them to be halted and mediated. Broadworth adds and subtracts paint at precise moments during the painting’s drying time. As a result, figure and ground trade back and fourth. Figural elements co-exist within rather than on top of the surface.

Broadworth belongs to a generation of painters who came of age when the dominant agenda for painters like Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe was to arrive at the "last painting". Contemporary painters have moved past this nihilistic moment by continuing to interpret and build upon painting’s established codes with a renewed reverence for the medium’s physical and visual possibilities. Broadworth is indebted to the conceptual underpinnings that led to the pursuit of the ‘last painting’, but believes that the physicality of painting offers endless possibilities for experimentation and exploration.