Après-coup

Tango Conway

18.04.26—17.05.26

Opening: 18 April

2— 4 pm

Après-coup revisits drawings made last year during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Six drawings, each with a graphite face and a mirrored charcoal surface, describe little moments quietly observed and detailed with fondness. Now re-framed, this exhibition establishes a new context for the work. Drawings that were made in response to a specific moment in time acquire fresh meanings and associations shaped by their current setting.

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After the long flight back to Sydney, when I took the drawings out to breathe again, the difference between how I experienced them in Paris and how they felt in the studio was stark. They were at odds with their new home and felt somewhat awkward. Of course, I was also feeling the quiet deflation of returning. The residency was over and with it the fantasy of Parisian studio life that I’d been living in for the last three months. This feeling of awkwardness between the works and me only intensified when I confirmed I would show them in Melbourne at Shivers Gallery. 

I found myself asking: what exactly were these drawings meant to do in Melbourne? For a while this question stalled me. Drawings made in Paris were suddenly expected to perform again, this time in a gallery in Brunswick. It felt like being asked to repeat a punchline for an audience who hadn’t heard the joke. 

Rather than asking what the drawings could say here, I began to wonder how their meaning might shift simply by being shown somewhere else. Now the works take on another life through the simple act of being uprooted and installed at Shivers Gallery.

The exhibition title reflects this shift. Après-coup, French for “after the fact” or “later on”, was also used by psychoanalysts to describe deferred action: the way memories are reinterpreted and take on new meaning in light of later experiences. The drawings themselves have become memories, artefacts and snapshots of a multitude of moments and the installation at Shivers gallery only adds more nuance and depth to their evolving perception. 

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Initially, I was investigating the drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres while making the works. His inventiveness and sensitivity to line inspired me to look for a balance between precision, looseness and chance within my own drawings.  I borrowed from monotype techniques, sketching my compositions in graphite on paper first, then placing them face down on a bed of charcoal dust. By retracing and pressing firmly from the back, line by line, the marks became embossed in charcoal, resulting in a mirrored image of the original graphite sketch.

In these drawings I also wanted to capture the experience of having just missed a moment, seeing only a glimpse of a fleeting second; A dog scampering across a path, birds interrupting the “perfect shot” or tourists mindlessly meandering in a museum. These six drawings are coded with a collage of personal experiences and will always be tethered to these memories. However, the time that hinges them between then and now only widens. Après-coup punctuates their lifespan with a fresh sense of place and a different audience after their initial affect, shedding a new light on how they might be understood.

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This exhibition booklet pieces together text and images by Tim Hardy, Adele Warner and me. Both friends of mine, and artists in their own right, Tim and Adele help me stitch together time and place. Adele moves between Paris and Sydney and Tim, based in Melbourne, will soon be living in New York. I met them both around the same time last year, Tim while he visited my girlfriend in Sydney and Adele on one of my first days in Paris.

I asked them both to respond to the feeling of being in or anticipating a move to an unfamiliar place. Like the drawings in this exhibition adjusting to new surroundings, Adele and Tim were able to relate to the same shifts in their own lives. 

Scattered throughout these pages are Adele’s iPhone photos from her time in Paris. With humour and intrigue, she captures a strangely offbeat aesthetic within a highly manicured city. We were on residency at the same time and as we got to know each other alongside the city, we found common ground in our observations. Unsurprisingly when Adele sent through her images, there were many echoes of scenes that I had also captured. As our images bounce through these pages they reflect a shared sense of estrangement from the place we had come to for inspiration.

Tim draws on recent months through a stream of diary fragments. Paired with photographs from the same period, these intimate glimpses move between the rapid and slow, accumulating into a sensitive representation of joy, frustration, love and unfurling. His writing grounds us in the textures of Melbourne, while he recounts fleeting thoughts and moments. This resembles my experiences in Paris and offers a way of understanding how these drawings might be able to hold a multitude of experiences at once.  

Together, their contributions sit alongside the drawings as another form of après-coup, extending the exhibition and reinforcing how meaning shifts between contexts after the fact. 

Thank you Tim, Adele, Eli, Zoe, Maragux, Box, Josh, Bernie and Emilie for your time and care.

Gabs, without you this work wouldn’t have made it out of Paris or to Melbourne. Thank you for being you.