Kelly Milton, Hanging around.., 2023. Digital print on glow in the dark surface. Courtesy: the artist and Incinerator Art Space, Sydney.

Show Pony, an exhibition of works by Kelly Milton, is a soiree of new contemporary visual arts. The exhibition is inspired by selecting historical artworks pivotal to the artist’s career development, and creatively disassembling, and recontextualising them, into a current aesthetic context.

Fanciful utopias, dramatic depictions, sentimental notions and fairy-tale tragedies are recontextualised to forge and create new visual scenarios, dispelling the underlying essence of grandiose self-gratification of dominant cultures by artists and hierarchical sentimentalities.
Eerie and insightful overlays, and the intertwining of contemporary interpretation and imagery, disrupt the niceties of the once-idealised compositions and separate intended themes from their original contexts.

Artworks such as Jean-Baptiste Pater’s Fête Galante (1730), and Death of Cook (1781-83) by John Webber, undergo paradoxical aesthetic and thematic ‘artistic surgery’ and enable the works to take on board new meaning, and an engaging, contemporary re-positioning.

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