Jarrad Martyn - Easy Pace

Currently at Peek-a-Boo Gallery is Jarrad Martyn's 'Easy Pace'.

'The painting Easy Pace explores my experiences with Spree Park, a deserted theme park in Berlin. The theme parks motif of a fallen dinosaur has been combined with imagery sourced from a variety of travel brochures. Through collage and painting, the meaning of these motifs is rearranged and reorganised, to create landscapes that operate between the real and the imagined.

Standing in front of the dinosaur, as if posing for a photograph, is a 17th century European plague doctor. In contemporary culture the doctor’s beak like mask has become synonymous with costumed events. Long removed from its original function to protect, the masks are now synonymous with being a tourist commodity across Southern Europe. A non descript Greek ruin is situated behind the figure, encouraging associations to the institution and accepted methods to undertake an activity.

By collapsing the distinctions between figuration and expressionism, a sense of destabilisation is created. The flat modular aesthetic of the tourist imagery is transformed into a landscape that is in a constant state of flux between motion and erasure, suggesting how fractured contemporary travel has become, through the removal of first hand experiences'.

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​Jarrad Martyn, Easy Pace, 2016, oil on canvas 55 x 82 cm.

​Jarrad Martyn, Easy Pace, 2016, oil on canvas 55 x 82 cm.