24 January 2006

An exhibition of paintings by local artist Tank has opened at the Shepparton Art Gallery.

Opened last Friday at the Shepparton Art Gallery is an exhibition of oil paintings several years in the making by local artist Tank. Tank is well celebrated in Shepparton for his artwork on several of the cows in the MooovingArt Parade, in addition to his paintings decorating the walls of the Yahoo Bar. THINK TANK is the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition and defines him as a rising talent in the region.

Tank is an artist that finds humor in the harsher ironies of life. For some people the vision of a lone baby, sitting in waist high water, holding onto to a live electric current that could become submerged at any time, is a vision of pure horror. This isn’t so for Tank. With a kind of perpetual hindsight, Tank is able to step back and find amusement in the strange and awkward situations in which his characters find themselves.

His paintings have a science-fiction, comic book style, where dangerous situations and futuristic landscapes become metaphors for other aspects of life, such as loneliness, abandonment, thwarted hopes or unanswered prayers. His images are sometimes captioned with statements creating a play on words. An example of this is the painting The Organ Grinder and his Monkey which does not depict a man and his monkey operating the musical instrument in the street as was common before the advent of radio, but a metal meat grinder, grinding ‘organs’. In Tank’s picture it is the grinding machine which seems to control and own the monkey, depicted as a small man.

The title of the exhibition is itself a play on words. Kirsten Lacy, curator at the Shepparton Art Gallery says the title acts as a self instruction to the artist to ‘think’ and also a noun in the sense that we are entering a Think Tank of sorts when we enter this exhibition.

“In this way the title reflects that Tank wants people to engage with his work, to contemplate how his stories might unravel and to use them as a kind of flexible metonym for own lives,” says Ms Lacy.

Think Tank continues until 12 February.