Paul Gundry

“Haunts is a selection of new works inspired by the world outside my front door. I capture my subject in the cool air and cold, early light of frosty winter mornings in suburban Hobart, placing my work in subtle collusion with various TV and cinema genres – mystery, suspense, Sci-Fi, and horror. I aim to present the suburban landscape in a state of calm that is both eerie and unnerving. In this manner, I am looking to reveal the commonplace and the everyday as simultaneously strange and familiar. By defamiliarizing that which is taken for granted, my practice looks to imbue its objects with a presence that is perhaps not readily apparent in the context of routine perception. In a strange rebuttal of the spirit of progress, the retrograde houses that often appear in my paintings harbour the spirits of a future that never arrives. Likewise, the cars that are either parked in, or moving through the landscape are apparitions of fantastic expectations that are never fully realised. Which is to say that their presence is characterised by an absence, spectres of the past that haunt the present, prompting, in Eugene Thacker’s words, “a disturbing reflection on the strange agency of the inanimate and impersonal materiality of the world around us and within us.” What frightens me as a liberal humanist subject is the loss of the Enlightenment project and its ideas of historical progress, but sometimes we are compelled to look into the darkness, and acknowledge the power of the negative.” Paul Gundry