Now & Then shows Frank Nowlan’s eclectic thinking through his distinctive painting style. Nowlan treads lightly with heavy subject matter, addressing attempted political assassinations and a series on a local bushranger gang. The straight presentation leads to a wry assessment of these encounters and their settings.
The “Attempts” series observes historical patterns and punishments. The event pictured in “The Attempt on Prince Alfred” led to hanging in April 1868. The attack on Prince Charles in 1994 resulted in a community service order for the assailant who later became a barrister. Nowlan has painted assassinations before including a focused look at JFK but these Australian instances are different. Each is a kind of failure and even the Hilton bombing that unfortunately led to deaths seems botched, with the intention remaining mysterious.
Previous series have focused on sport and there is a similar staging of the events pictured here. Figures are treated like actors in a play confronting one another armed with props – a shotgun, a musket, a starting pistol. In a stand-alone painting (after John Brack’s “Collins St., 5pm” from 1955) we see figures on a train, each gripping a mobile phone or tablet. The flatness of the images leads to this sense of a stage set where actions are choreographed. Prince Alfred encounters his assailant on a green patch in Clontarf where the diminutive hills wrap around and enclose the figures in the foreground. Nowlan’s Austinmer Beach landscape tucks into the frame on either side like an operatic set with the escarpment behind. And each picture in the bushranger series seems lit in the round.
Frank Nowlan is always looking, whether at historical images or the work of other painters. For the current landscapes he is looking from a train window as it travels across the Nullarbor. He is also reinspecting his knowledge of events as a history teacher. This exhibition shows divergent interests but the title Now & Then reveals an absurdist’s approach to the repetitions of history.
-Melody Willis
