Art Month sneak preview: Dark side of the Road

Black Spot on Bombay Road

There’s only one week to go before the opening of Dark Side of the Road at Gaffa Gallery. If you can make it on March 7, please come along for a drink and chat between 6pm-8pm. It’ll be lovely to see you. For those of you who can’t make it, here’s a selection of the 10 works that will be in the exhibition and what it’s all about.

Dark side of the Road explores rural landscapes that have been impacted by the hand of man. Mountains are garlanded with communications towers, paddocks are jammed with monocrops pushed to the horizon, gullies are scoured by erosion and animals lay decimated by the roadside.

The bright colours and vibrant collages mask a dark heart. Dark side of the Road looks beyond preconceptions of the countryside to reveal Australia’s ugly beauty.

I was driving to the tip and strong winds had whipped up plastic bags and tangled them in the branches of Hawthorn bushes and barbed wire fences, it was obscene but compelling. From that point on, I saw the countryside around me with new eyes. I wasn’t living in this untouched bucolic landscape, I was living in a place where all the land stretching to the horizon had been impacted in some way. Dammed gullies, noxious weeds, carved out mountains, scoured hillsides – the rural idyll was shattered.