A vibrant place in the heart of the city, Canberra Museum and Gallery celebrates the region's social history and visual arts with dynamic exhibitions and unique community programs and events.

Housing a permanent collection, Reflecting Canberra, and a variety of local, national and international exhibitions, CMAG provides a refreshing insight to the integration of social history and the visual arts.

Reflections

An-ism, 2006
medium density fibre
board (mdf), enamel paint
28 x 37 x 25 cm
Purchased 2007

Peter VANDERMARK

born 1960.

Peter Vandermark graduated from the ANU School of Art in 1989. He has exhibited extensively, including a solo exhibition at CMAG in 2004, and most recently at Tim Olsen Gallery in Sydney this year. His work has encompassed installation art, large public sculptures and constructions from found materials as well as cast plaster.

An-ism is from a series of sculptures comprised of commerciallyproduced lettering cut from mdf and other materials and previously used as signage. Each work has been carefully composed from letters spelling a particular word. In the case of An-ism, the letters used spell ‘terror’.

In Vandermark’s art there are always oblique references to art history and contemporary practice. Here the example of Dadaist collage and random letter combinations come to mind, as indeed does the phrase containing every letter in the English alphabet: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. If these are present they are subsumed into the artist’s defi antly personal aesthetic and act merely as other layers in this compact and witty assemblage.

The combination of formal sculptural concerns with a sociopolitical agenda underpinned by an incisive sense of humour characterises Vandermark’s intriguing plastic statements.