RAINBOW APHORISMS : DAVID MCDIARMID

RAINBOW APHORISMS : DAVID MCDIARMID

In 2012, Sally Gray collaborated with Neon Parc, Melbourne, to present authorised estate editions of David McDiarmid’s ‘Rainbow Aphorisms’, a series of digital prints from the mid-1990s in which McDiarmid, like Oscar Wilde before him, harnessed the power of the aphorism to express a self-defined world-view. These art works extend the language and text employed strategically by McDiarmid in his work from the 1970s onwards. In his earliest work exhibited in 1976 McDiarmid used collage and text to evoke the coded world of gay male urban subcultures in the large cities of the western world. In the eighties he used calligraphic text in ‘graffiti paintings’ derived from New York subway art. In the early nineties he invented fake ‘headlines’ referencing the virulence of tabloid newspaper responses to AIDS. The ‘Rainbow Aphorisms’ encapsulate his fiercely defiant response to the political, emotional, psychological and medical conditions created by the AIDS epidemic.

Reviews

Dan Rule (2012) “In Living Colour”, The Age, Nov 10, 2012
Penny Webb (2012) “Rainbow Warrior Turned Craft into a Crusading Art Form”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Nov, 2012
Dan Rule (2012) David McDiarmid’s Rainbow Aphorisms at Neon Parc, Broadsheet, 1 Nov, 2012

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< class="portfolio_title" > Exhibitions Manager, State Library of NEW SOUTH WALES