Nick Longford
Street Life
4 – 28 August 2022
Opening | Saturday 6 August 3 – 5 pm
Fox Galleries Presents Nick Longford’s ‘Street Life’, as we enter deep into winter.
This distinctive series of echoed portraits and slippery silhouettes appear to be veiled in a soft fibrous grey blanket; shrouded in recollection.
Longford tenderly enfolds the viewer into a concentrated image turning the invisible into the visible. Reverberating with the noise, clamour, street art and vibrance of the city streets the figures, by not being fully exposed cerebrally conjure our ability to ignore reality. An unconscious realism, a quiet dismay that is dream like.
Longford encounters street life with observation going beyond the assumptions of others lived experience to a more connected presence of ‘being human’, not ‘doing human’, revealing the warmth and universal idiosyncrasies beneath the blanket of raising awareness.
Nick Longford Statement;
“ I am interested in the human experience. On a daily basis I am presented with what the ‘ideal’ life should be, a standard of living to aspire to and supposedly a reflection of the lives of others. But what are the lives of others actually like?
I paint people I see within their everyday lives, living on the streets of our cities. People with very different lives to that of my own and those we often try to ignore. I see these people as important reflections of our culture.
In many ways, those living on the streets know the true identity of our cities. Maybe there is much we can learn about our culture from those who live on the streets we walk along.”
The exhibition is currently on display at 67 Wellington Street, you can view the virtual exhibition HERE
NICK LONGFORD
is a painter living and working in Adelaide. After studying Visual Art Longford pivoted into a career of Architecture throughout Australia, it was this movement that prompted a piercing investigation of the human condition, and the representation and rights of homelessness within our culture.
Influenced by the synergies between Art and Architecture, Longford’s paintings reflect the integrity embedded within Architecture and Street Life and the covert impacts in human behavior and experience. Longford’s shares his observations of people in times of uncertainty, like with Picasso’s Blue Period, they are dominated by a subdued palette, the utilization of monochrome with traces of built up lines and shadowy surfaces that reflect his personal and sensitive responses to the disenfranchised individuals he encounters. It is this tenderness that operates on the all too familiar concept of the bystander effect.