LAG at Poimena Gallery is tackling painting's place in the 'screen age'

In his curated show, LAG - exhibiting now at Launceston Grammar School's Poimena Gallery - Curran, who moved to Launceston 18 months ago, has collected the works of 11 Tasmanian, national and international artists to show what painting offers in an "age dominated by the screen".

LAG brings together works from artists abroad and locally, like those of Launceston's Glover Prize winning Josh Foley and the Paris-based Australian painter Gregory Hodge.

"We're surrounded by devices, and we often think that handmade things are obsolete; but they serve a different purpose," Curran said.

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"Painting anchors us in the present moment and gives us a material investigation that we can be with in the present and explore.

"But do some works benefit the mind better when, say, you're experiencing digital burnout? That's what this show is about: figuring out what the qualities in paintings are that help us psychologically."

The new exhibition - housed at Poimena until September 21 - hosts 25 paintings and mixed-media works from artists Leah Bullen, Ben Rak, Caleb Nichols-Mansell, John Vella, Megan Keating, James Lieutenant, Annika Koops, Skye Mescall and Troy Ruffels.

LAG is named after the colloquial term for digital latency, like when a film buffers on a streaming service because of slow internet connection.

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It also borrows its name from an "aesthetic and social value" put forward by a German art critic Jan Verwoert who believes unearthing meaning from a work in a delayed fashion - the opposite of today's "instant gratification" society - was important.

Besides the thematic undertone, the show includes works which are slightly off-kilter to artistic convention: Skye Mescall's oil on board works, for example, are her own paintings of scenes created through generative artificial intelligence.

Others like Megan Keating's Nature Strip are made of a new type of paint, a pearlescent pigment which gives the "effect of light on a butterfly's wings".

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Josh Foley's large oil on linen work Sarah Island Circa 1832, which Launceston would know well for being hung locally at Du Cane Brewer, is a key figure in the exhibition, too.

Foley said the piece is a "fairly wild" abstraction of another painting, a still life by 19th century colonial Tasmanian artist Wiliam Buelow Gould.

"It's a fleshy work that relates to that kind of violent atmosphere of the time," Foley said.

"It makes you double take with that sort of upending of expectations of what an object in space looks like in comparison with something like a phone screen's relentless flatness.

"It changes as you walk around the space where these lights bounce off different layers like stacks of stained glass."

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For Curran, Foley's works and the others in LAG are attempts to remove viewers from their immersion in digital culture, which he said has "lost some of its lustre and magic."

"We have people being digitally burnt out and they need something to snap them out of it," he said.

"People are saying what's wrong, what's happening? Well, maybe they need a prescription to go and buy a Josh Foley painting."

LAG is showing until September 21 at Poimena Art Gallery at Launceston Grammar School.

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