Tom O'Hern: Thagomizer

New works in oil and ceramic (fat and mud).

Frogodiles, cloned thylacines, bones, prehistoric fish and flying reptiles.

There’s fourish bodies of work in the show.  The thread that connects them is how the world has ended and started again. People always say you’re acting like it’s the end of the world as though the world hasn’t ended before.

The ceramics are genetically modified thylacines that have gone wrong. I went to a build your own Pokémon class with my kid run by Armie Sungvaribud. At about the same time I got to meet some of the people trying to use CRISPR to bring back the thylacine. It all just sort of came together from there. They reckon they can edit a dunart’s DNA and turn it into a thylacine, like they just did with the dire wolf. I was thinking what if they can bring it back but they can’t get the stripes right and then I was thinking about that scene in Alien 4 when Ripley comes across all the clones of herself that have gone wrong and they’re all like ‘kiiilll meee.’ 

The other ceramics are based on frogodiles at a fossil site near Otago bay. The Uni has put up a sign there that says Hobart 250 million years ago. It’s all frogodiles and fish and swamp and someone has shot the sign up full of bullets.

The paintings are sort of prehistoric landscape paintings. I was thinking about all the dollerite and granite and glacial erratics. I’ve got this cool map of megafauna that’s been dug up around London and I was thinking of something similar for Tassie. At the Uni they have some crocodile footprints dug up from Knocklofty that look only a day or two old. I read somewhere we are currently pumping out carbon faster than the volcanoes that caused the End-Permian mass extinction that killed 90 percent of life on Earth. ????

Then I have some smoodgie portraits that I sort of did by accident. They are people from the Garden of Eden or maybe they after everything has fallen apart and started again and tropical vines have grown all over everything. 

O’Hern describes with a strange fondness those lost parts of suburbia where weeds choke unpopular infrastructure. Blackberries, hemlock, willows—those stranglers of drains, signposts and rubbish—poisonous and picturesque foxgloves, peering over smashed glass and cokes cans and stolen bikes. His monster drawings evolve the same way, exploding across the paper rhizomatically, as if roots direct routes in some kind of cell-splitting, replicating, cloning, swarming, breeding…

…but O’Hern’s monsters are not monstrous. The monstrous, like the abject, includes in its own expression the desire by others to cast it out, to reject or to escape it. O’Hern’s monsters are not sinister, they’re comical: full of fractured smiles that are full of fractal tracks of sharp teeth; thousands of wall eyes, they look like they’re laughing. But they’re not quite hysterical either, the artist’s command of his medium is too convincing; there is no loss of control.

Perhaps it is the artist’s work to tame the monstrous? Like the child in a Patrick White novel who both fears and reveres a cascading monstera deliciosa; his every humiliation is caught in the thousand eyes of his own delicious monster.