Jon Tarry | Fold Inversion, 2023, oil paint on marine plywood, 110 x 100 x 15cm
A new series of paired artworks with each dependent on the other for reference, reflection and rumination. Luminous light paintings sit alongside carved sculptural wall works, playing with optical fields and creating a deep visceral presence on surfaces.
'There is a restless funk that comes with the routine of regular airline travel, the uncanniness of airports, security checks, taxis. Sometimes I forget where I am, here or there, coming or going. At one time I began to photograph the line markings on the tarmac, as if to record their meaning, hoping they might reveal some secret of our time, or make some secret clear to me. It seems to me that the same wanderers hope might be the impetus for Jon Tarry’s sonic art and sculptures.
The no-place condition of transit is countered from altitude, the spectacular specificity of every gesture of the earth and billowing drama of the clouds. The endless inventiveness of creation and time. The leaping sun over glittering shoals, atmospheric rivers raining shadows that swim and sink across the land. Even at night, the isolated galaxies of towns, the deep blackness of waterways, the fragile nervous system of roads, lit with synaptic vehicles beaming, streaming along their length, form a terrestrial cosmos of potential.
On the road, yet travelling still, not looking ahead but to the verge, out the passenger window again, carried along. I’m thinking about Ed Ruscha and Psycho Spaghetti Western #5, but now looking past the heroic detritus of the verge to rocks and trees and shadows in this the greatest estate on earth. Shadows lay flat on the hillside, buttressing the light with contrast. A little further down the road there is a lonely guide post delineating landscape from infrastructure. Foliage seems to levitate over the leaden shadows, a streaking hillside rushes with us, beneath eternal flora. Stones too, perhaps sitting since before linear time began, belligerent and bewildering in their stasis.
And yet still the atmospheric river runs with altitude under pressure, like stealth bombers flying out to unknown destinations, toward undisclosed activity. Like bleary travellers on the first flight out, baffled and bewildered by the sameness of airports, the banality of modernity’s familiarity. So too in Jon Tarry’s uncanny examinations, palimpsests of landing strips, taxiways and terminals. The infrastructure of changing places.
The experience of take-off is made sublime by the threat of engine failure, of fiery death or salty sleep. And yet we join that fleet of in-betweeners on the atmospheric river, seeing what was once experienced at eye-level, now revealed by altitude as schematics of airport, city and country beyond. We see again the Woy Woy Road from another vantage, the flawed geometry of cultivation as agriculture meets landscape’s indifference. And again, a shadow, a crucifix at first, but resolved not the son of man, our 737.'
Mark Raggatt, 2023
