Absolute Colour
Museum of Art and Culture Yapang, Lake Macquarie, NSW.
Mazie Karen Turner, Daniel O’Toole, Amy Jane Scully
13 April - 2nd June 2024
Curator- Jasmine Kean
What do you really know about colour? That the sky is blue?
That the ocean reflects, and that a clever application of pigments on a surface can build a visual landscape.
To perceive a painting or any visual stimulus, is to unconsciously solve a puzzle.
As a composition traverses from the picture plane to your mind through an absorption and reflection of light waves, the brain combines that data with other information such as shape, motion, memory and even emotions, to form a picture.
But is my blue your blue, and for those who can see colours with music through synaesthesia, what note makes blue? As colour is to light what tone is to sound. The two can comingle too, evoking parts in us that may otherwise lay dormant.
Absolute Colour unites three artists who explore the perception of colour in its absoluteness. Daniel O’Toole, Amy Jane Scully, and the late Mazie Karen Turner, have created work which orders and composes colour in purposeful play, while exploring the dark voids that know no colour.
These artists question how we acquire knowledge as we experience a world in flux mediated by our senses. For example, our geolocation and time of day impacts how we perceive an object - as colour ripens with light, it also changes with the blue hour of dawn and dusk. Sensitive to luminance, our knowing minds decipher things we already know, such as the colour of the sky. But whose blue is truly blue?
(text by Jasmine Kean)
Daniel O’Toole
Pure Colour – New Works
Daniel O'Toole born in 1984 in Sydney, is a multimedia and sound artist working in Melbourne/Naarm. O’Toole’s work integrates experimental soundscapes into his exhibitions, where paintings are often accompanied by uniquely created soundtracks. In these new works he has used acrylic on polycotton to achieve a smooth surface which gives the illusion of spatial depth.
Layers of atomised paint interact to form new colour hues that echo the refraction of light waves, back to the refraction paintings which incorporate a semi-transparent screen. The surface can be discovered as a textured noisy field of particles analogous to film grain, whilst at greater distances the colours blend in a seamless, almost digital way.
New Utopia and Dusk Landing are the largest works O’Toole has created to date, exploring the immersive and perceptual power of working at scale. New Utopia is intended to combine more natural colour relationships with more challenging ones, feeling euphoric yet slightly unsettling, whilst Dusk Landing was a piece made with a photographic reference in mind.
Flying back from MAC yapang, I was snapping phone pics of the sky out the airplane window as we came into land at dusk. The way the colours shifted towards blue and then eventually the deep black of the night sky is something I always enjoy. Somehow seeing this from a few thousand feet up, allows these gradients of colour to appear richer and closer, more immersive than from the ground; a feeling I search for in my own work.
Photo documentation - Doqument