REFLECTIONS ON HYPERSPACE
November 29, 2006 - December 22, 2006
PRESS RELEASE
Peter Daverington has been a significant player in the development of graffiti in Melbourne since the 1980s.
In 1991 he teamed up with Merda to win the first national aerosol art competition (held in Melbourne), and throughout the 90’s Peter developed a distinctive aesthetic that is unique amongst local graffiti culture and the all pervasive NYC inspired Wildstyle.
The stylised lettering of his early pieces feature miniature landscapes, architectural elements and his trademark checkerboard, all tropes that reappear in his most recent works.
Two years spent living in Egypt influenced Peter to make connections between Arabic calligraphy and graffiti lettering and further produced an appreciation of the Eastern origins of Western optics and the mystical dimensions of geometry and mathematics, via Sufi philosophy.
Upon return to Australia, Peter commenced a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and Reflections on Hyperspace is the result of his research.
‘The realm of hyperspace is a product of the 1980s, a now anachronistic future dreaming that yoked together the hedonism of early digital and late disco with the expansive complex spaces of a Romantic revival. In this, Daverington’s paintings owe as much as Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 opium-fuelled vision of an exotic Eastern palace, the ”pleasure-dome,” around which caverns, rivers, walls and towers erupt from the earth and tumble together in fragments.
Dr Lachlan MacDowall 2006
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