Ian McCallum is an Australian artist whose practice slips between indoor and outdoor work. He explores the interaction of color, notions of the everyday, how the body interacts with a painting intuitively, the history of the surface and found elements. McCallum’s documentative process of repositioning his daily interactions through layering and a collage-like aesthetic creates a visual anthropology. The studio work utilizes photography, interspersed with fast and intuitive surface experiments that form a diary of the artist's thought processes.
When working in the public realm, his practice is heavily informed by his studio paintings and the interactions of the immediate environment of the artwork. This creates a dialogue between the outdoor and the indoor and the slippage that occurs in the transference of ideas. McCallum discusses the distinction between how things look and how we judge them to be. By painting on a large canvas, a certain form of external experience implies and produces a consciousness of one’s own body within its environment; discussing perception and questioning scale. This approach seeks mindfulness in the ordinary and leads to the understanding of the world.
