George Egerton-Warburton at Neon Parc

Artist: George Egerton-Warburton

Exhibition title: GODOT GROTTO GOROKE

Venue: Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia

Date: May 17 – June 15, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne

Neon Parc is excited to present

GODOT GROTTO GOROKE, George Egerton-Warburton’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

GODOT GROTTO GOROKE is an installation on a horizontal plane. A sprawl of objects, found, made, and altered, are organised like a community or congregation.

Textiles, augers, a meat -grinder, dust, a punching bag, a chair, a log, combine to create characters or effigies; a keg cut in half, stuck atop some trolley legs is welded into a portable BBQ; series of abandoned animal shelters evoke the paradox of mutual care and control; a maquette of an emu cuts a silhouette on the horizon; paintings suggesting states of mind or weather patterns that loom as expanses of space. Conceived of as a single entity, GODOT GROTTO GOROKE is a factory for meaning-making.

The installation invokes the space between a home and machinery shed in a light- industrial area, where animals and trees mix with abandoned structures and temporary fixes for equipment. As a transitional space where behaviour changes, it is ripe with the potential for metaphor. Spare parts and main characters are given equal weight. Hum and movement reverberate from kinetic sculptures. Together the objects act as a family tree of neurosis rather than people.

Like the rhythm, fog, and atmosphere the sculptures create, the title of the exhibition is a kind of incantation made from alliteration. Goroke is the Wotjobaluk word for “Magpie” and also the town Australian author Gerald Murnane retired to. The literary references within this exhibition – Murnane, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath – point to the materiality of waiting. They are also authors that are obliquely political, examining the symptomatic way that structural violence bubbles throughout society. As the artist suggests, “They would never say something overt, like ‘recent Australian agriculture is a big poem written by Monsanto,’ or ‘galleries are extremist organisations.’”

George Egerton-Warburton (b.1988, Kojonup, Western Australia. Lives and works in New York).

George Egerton-Warburton employs text, sculpture, painting and video in his art practice to examine the discord between impulses and behaviours shaped by cultural norms. His installation works frequently feature sensory elements, from the smells and sounds of kinetic sculptures and motors to the productive, industrial associations of grease, hot plastic and metal.

Egerton-Warburton has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas, including solo exhibitions at Sutton Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art, West Space, and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart; Shoot the Lobster, New York City; and Artspace, Auckland. He has also shown in a number of group exhibitions in Australia, the United States and Japan. In 2022, he completed a PhD in Fine Art (Research) at MADA, Monash University.

The exhibition is accompanied by a script written by Justin Clemens.