Tonee Messiah, Plasticine Grasp, 2023. Oil on canvas, 82 x 122cm. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery 9, Sydney.

Gallery 9 presents work by Tonee Messiah.

The collection of paintings presented in Of the Known Kind explore potential expansions made possible through changed frameworks of reference. They consider ‘what else’ is present in meeting, reading and knowing another without the foundations of category or ocular designation.

Conventional traditions of observation, perception and cognition of a human subject pose limitations in classification and description. Approaching this subject abstractly, by seeking to ignore the confines of tradition and questioning how the cognition of a human subject might be known if it is not framed in familiar classifications. Dissolution of the specificity to the body alone broadens the possibility of sensory intake, expanding out to the impact and influence imparted on a subject from the space they occupy. A subject is observed as a conglomerate of the body and the space it is within.

These paintings are portraits of the total sum of a human subject and the imprint or trace left by its habitat, accounting for the enmeshed energetic interactions and affects exchanged between them. They are not accurate, or even real, but are slippery and speculative and formed over durational stretches of time. Allowing for the same subject to alter its particularity from one space to another, taking on and excreting influence from place to place without needing to hold onto the structure of a defined singular identity.

Abstraction as a practice of camouflaged perception and expression is grounded in the malleability of truth and is best served with a critique of the fixity of ‘knowing.’ What better place to aim this lens than towards the perpetual alternation of the human subject.

Opening Event: Wednesday 22 March, 6 – 8pm.

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