About — Jason Moad Artist

Jason Moad is a realist painter based in Melbourne Australia. He is represented by Fox Galleries in Melbourne and .MContemporary in Sydney. His work has been placed in many private collections (both in Australia and overseas) and the ANL Corporate Collection.

He writes of his recent work:

“The poet John Keats expounded a theory he called Negative Capability, which he saw as the ability to live with mystery in the face of enlightenment values that insist everything have a neat, tidy, satisfactory and ultimately rational answer. Human beings, at least since the enlightenment, have tended to categorise and rank the natural world, including living organisms, in hierarchies, separating everything into higher and lower forms. Far from scientific, this is a system as much influenced by historical, cultural and religious values as anything else; values perhaps more suited to the production of art.

I have never thought of myself as especially botanically minded. I was initially attracted to the succulents I have been painting and drawing because they looked so striking. Gradually, however, my interest and appreciation deepened and I have tended to paint plants as subjects, rather than mere objects. In my work they represent the other-than-human, partly inspired by the work currently being done by a few brave scientists and philosophers exploring the remarkable likelihood that at least some plants, despite not possessing brains or nervous systems, are none-the-less capable of learning and memory. Plants and fungi, it turns out, can feel pain, be anaesthetised and probably, in some way, even see. There is increasing speculation that they possess some form of consciousness. We like to see ourselves as separate from nature and the inevitable pinnacle of evolution. One need only look around to see how that is working out. The truth is, we live in a world full of people and, as an animist, I’m keen to point out that only some of them are human.

Previously, I worked on a series of paintings that amount to a love letter to residual media. In recent years I've found myself feeling uneasy about the rapid progress of the digital revolution. As someone who spends his days crafting objects, the increasingly ephemeral nature of our cultural artefacts troubles me. Music, literature and film aren’t just insubstantial ghosts- until very recently, they also had a concrete reality. We are tactile creatures and I think the experience of culture is poorer for a lack of physical connection. The feel and smell of riffling the pages of a paperback, or even flipping through the liner notes in a CD booklet (itself a poor substitute for the delights of the LP gatefold sleeve) are an integral part of the experience.

Despite the momento mori quality of some of the pictures (appropriate because, after all, I appear to be on the wrong side of this argument) I hope the work is playful as well as though provoking.

The contrast and contradiction between these two recent bodies of work (on the one hand lamenting the inexorable slide of cultural towards the intangible and on the other questing after the ephemeral in our lived experience of base reality) isn’t lost on me Thankfully, I have Negative Capability to fall back on!"

Please see the Available folder for works still for sale. Feel free to contact Jason if you have any questions or would like to commission a painting, including portraits.

jasonmoadartist@gmail.com

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SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019 Oddfellows, Fox Galleries, Melbourne

2017 Tangible, Fox Galleries, Melbourne

Tangible, M Contemporary, Sydney

2014 Series of Dreams, Gallery 34, Yea, Victoria

2010 All’s Well That Ends, Art At Cyclone, Melbourne

2009 Natural History, Art At Cyclone, Melbourne

2008 Fear Of Ghosts, McCulloch Gallery, Melbourne

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2019 Party of Special Things, Fox Galleries, Melbourne

2018 New Dawn, Fox Galleries, Melbourne

Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, .MContemporary stand

Culture Pop, .MContemporary, Sydney

2017 Denfair, Fox Galleries, Melbourne

Finalist- Kennedy Prize

2016 Finalist – ANL Mission To Seafarer’s Art Prize, Melbourne

2014 Finalist – The Sir John Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Archibald Prize- Salon Des Refuses, National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery

2012 Finalist – The Albany Art Prize

Finalist – The Sir John Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales

2011 Art At Barrabool Exhibition

Finalist – ANL Mission to Seafarer’s Art Prize, Melbourne

2010 Finalist- The Fletcher Jones Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, Geelong

Finalist- Lethbridge 10 000 Art Prize,Lethbridge Gallery, Brisbane

2009 Anthology, Kiln Gallery, Brisbane

Group Show, Ransom Gallery, Eumundi

2008 End of year show, McCulloch Gallery, Melbourne

Wish, Kiln Gallery, Brisbane

Absinthe Festival, McCulloch Gallery, Melbourne

2007 Delshan Art Gallery, Melbourne

AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

2009 Highly Commended, Brunswick Street Gallery, Small Works Prize

2004 Students Choice Award, Churchie Emerging Art Exhibition

1999 The Pine Rivers Art Prize, Morton Bay Region