The Thousands

Format is hosting two projects in the gallery this month – Kel Mocilnik’s solo exhibition In Pursuit of Repetition and Stephanie Crase’s latest large-scale oil painting. Mocilnik, who is well-known for his collaborative works with dancer Alison Currie, is an artist and a qualified mechanic. Which means not only is he good at tools, he also has an on-going interest in mechanical systems as metaphors for patterns/time/existence/stuff. Fittingly, In Pursuit of Repetition is appearing in a series of instalments – this is the second. The first one was two little matchbox cars that went round and round in circles in the aEaf’s window. Sometimes they would skitz out and fly off the tracks and Kel would have to put them back on. Sometimes you would watch them go round and round and nothing would happen. A bit too much like real life.

It’s a thin connection between these otherwise unrelated projects, but like Kel’s slsot cars, Steph Crase’s paintings transmit something of the mind-numbing, circular rhythm of everyday existence. There is something about the vibrating late-night lights in her paintings of petrol stations and car parks that makes you think they could be pictures of any night in the history of time. I mean, it couldn’t be a picture of any night in the history of time, since suburbia is a phenomena specific to the last fifty years, but it feels like it could be, alright?