Concrete Playground

The year opens at Firstdraft with four solo artists who skillfully sidestep any accusations of navel gazing. More accurately, the focus of these exhibitions is in notions of the beyond. Each artist delves into subject matter which is almost out of their reach, extending themselves in the process.

Laura McLean navigates the High Seas, using international waters as a cipher for autonomy. In seeking to negotiate this expanse beyond landscape and law, McLean draws on the romanticised pirate - a character that carries the additional weight of much recent news. The use of both large scale and detailed forms points towards the broader and more intimate implications of the works.

In I got confused with the t'shirt, Elizabeth McCrystal documents the everyday routines of her subject over a two month period. Using these banal repetitions as a building block, McCrystal is able to delve into some big ideas, like existentialism, in an intimate and touching way.

Jorge Araujo's TRANSAUSTRALIAN paintings focus not on a singular narrative generated by the artist. Instead, Araujo has worked from found photographs, transforming them into a consistent body of work through the application of his own style. Similarly, Tarron Ruiz-Avila has generated The Fall of Grace from glossy, preferably discarded, magazines, relying on intuition to create a new narrative.

Image: 'I got confused with the t'shirt', Elizabeth McCrystal 2011