Backwash
Robert Bittenbender, Isabella Darcy, George Egerton-Warburton, Sarah Goffman, Spencer Lai, Marian Tubbs, and Philadelphia Wireman
Curated by Oscar Capezio and Tony Oates
1 September – 22 October 2023
Drill Hall Gallery
ANU, Canberra, Australia
Contemporary artists have lived through an era of uncertainty
and disillusionment. Floating along a current of late-capitalism, a
self-perpetuating system of waste, they find themselves stuck in
a cyclical deadlock, overloaded with images of humanity’s self-
destruction. In creating art from the ‘backwash’ of contemporary
life, this group of artists seek to grapple with a tide of excessive
mass consumption and an ever intensifying globalisation by
readdressing its residues.
Perhaps resigned to the idea that art’s power to change the
world has disappeared, or equally suspicious of the subsumption of
art into a commodified, institutionalised market, many artists prefer
to work within the ‘backwash’ as a way to express their discomfort.