RODNEY GLICK

Born 1961 in Perth, Australia. Lives and works in Perth.

Rodney Glick, Everyone No.75, 2009, carved and painted wood, 120 x 120 x 55 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Dewandra Djelantik 'Everyone Series,'. Project Team: Made Leno, Chris Hill, Dewa Tirtayasa, Wayan Darmadi, Nyoman Suweta, Rob Finlayson, Tony Nathan, Claire Evans

Rodney Glick is a multifarious artist, art lecturer and serial inventor of fictional worlds. Dealing in purpose-built art, public art, architecture, video, design and furniture, his projects are broad and unique, such as his ambitious venture to construct the world’s largest snow dome, in motion since 2000.

Glick’s ongoing body of work, ‘Defaced’, is based on a collection of found photographs that record the experiences of a Vietnamese family during the mid-twentieth century. In a seemingly brutal stroke, Glick has scratched the photographs to erase the faces of the subjects, rendering them unrecognisable. With history wiped clean, viewers are left to fill the void with their own imaginations, inserting eyes and cheekbones and expressions as they see fit, even inventing new stories regarding the time and place of each image. In some images, Glick leaves a single face intact among a crowd – circling the subject or drawing an arrow towards them – pointedly manipulating the focus of the viewer, and eliciting wonder as to why the individual has been separated from the group: Who are they? Glick skilfully plays with our reliance on photographic records for the information that they bring, as well as on the recent history of Vietnam and the western world.

In 2007, Glick created ‘a new public pool’, PICA Pool, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, covering an entire floor with made-to-scale flat paintings made from cut tarpaulins that created shapes simulating the pool’s diving boards, depth markings, water, steps, and spa. The result – best viewed from the floor above – is a playful recasting of a popular Australian pastime.

Glick is interested in the practice of ‘superfictions’ in artmaking, and has formulated a Klusian philosophy that includes nine steps to physical and moral enlightenment, developing also the Alice Black Theory of Emerging Art in collaboration with writer and filmmaker David Solomon. As part of this, they are currently developing a new Haggadah, a Jewish religious text, which will bring together Glick’s illustrations and Solomon’s translations and commentaries.

Glick’s ongoing ‘Everyone’ series, which has its genesis in the medium of digitally manipulated imagery, draws from Indian Hindu paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With a sense of drama, symbolism and outlandish humour, he portrays a wide demographic of ‘everyday’ people in various theatrical, symbolic poses – as warrior and conqueror, in a state of meditative bliss, engaged in a surreal fantasy. He then works with Balinese woodcarvers who carve the composite images in wood and paint them with acrylic. In this way Indian mythology is introduced into a western context, as everyday people are shown in yogic poses with multiple arms, surrounded by lotus flowers, imbued with the powers, strengths and emotions of the Hindu gods. Glick seems to be making the point that just as the gods possess humanlike frailties, the human species possesses a god-like capacity for love, courage and even vengeance. He also portrays himself in such poses of Indo-western god-like bliss, showing himself as a kind of everyman.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Punching the Devil’, Salihara Contemporary Art Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia
2009 ‘24Hr Panoramas’ with Lynnette Voevodin, GAV Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan
2008 ‘God-favoured: Rodney Glick, Surveyed’, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
2007 ‘PICA POOL ’, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia
2004 ‘Ambitious? Who, Me?’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘THING’, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
2008 ‘Inhabit Project’, Brisbane Museum, Brisbane, Australia
2007 ‘The Roving Eye’, Australian Embassy, Washington DC, USA
2006 ‘Within the revolution, everything—a little while longer’, 9th Havana Biennale, Havana, Cuba
2002 25th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Selected Biblography

John Barrett-Lennard, ‘Who, Me? When, now? Rodney Glick’s questions for everyone’, God-favoured: Rodney Glick Surveyed, exhibition catalogue, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2008, pp. 2–13
Gary Dufour, ‘I am, This is’, Artist in Focus, Rodney Glick and Lynnette Voevodin: 24hr Panoramas, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2006, pp. 5–7
Chris Hill, ‘New works from Rodney Glick’s Everyone Series’, Punching the Devil, exhibition catalogue, Salihara Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2009, pp. 4–9
Chris Hill, ‘Call to arms: Works from Rodney Glick’s Everyone series’, God-favoured: Rodney Glick Surveyed, exhibition catalogue, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2008, pp. 14–20
Russell Storer, ‘Glick’s Game’, Ambitious? Who, Me? Newish Work by Rodney Glick, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004, pp. 6–19