Ever wonder what 30 years of photographic experience looks like?
Exhibit A – Gary Sheppard’s ‘Mephisto’ exhibition, at Black Eye Gallery.
There’s something innately fascinating about liquids, the way they ebb and flow. Sheppard lets their differing densities; colours and molecular structures do their thing loop, swirl and disperse before he photographs them.
The process sounds simple: pouring a mixture of varnishes, inks and dyes in water. Then, it’s all point, shoot and invert.
But his art takes time, and lots of it. The ripple motifs Sheppard captures are not only strikingly beautiful but one of a kind. Never has each instant of patterns and colour he captures existed before and never will it exist again. There’s something to be said about the finite nature of Sheppard’s symmetrical ripples, mirroring our human condition. Are we getting too deep in this D&M?
Upon close inspection, the Mephisto series resembles Rorschach’s ink blot psychology test. The word ‘mephisto’ translates to Lucifer, a scatterer and disperser of lies in German folklore. Fancy a little introspection? It’s said that what you see is a manifestation of how you see the world, or in this case, the creatures and chaos you’re waiting to unearth…
We’ve all got dem demons.
A wise man answering to the name of G. Sheppard once (recently) said
Art is a journey of discovery… it feeds the soul
Now all that serious business is over we fired some quick fire questions his way…
What makes you angry?
The stratification of society into the haves and have nots.
The fact that our society is leaving a depleted and scarred world for future generations.
How the government is manipulated to think that they can’t tackle major problems like climate change and inequality.
The way that governments let multinational companies blatantly dodge their tax and social responsibilities, instead cracking down on pensioners, the unemployed and the underprivileged.
Cruelty in the industrial agriculture which is largely avoidable if everything wasn’t beholden to the profit-at-any-cost motive. I recently did an exhibition of photos of rescued farm animal to help some friends of ours who own a farm animal rescue sanctuary — using my skills to help animals is a kind of balm for the soul.
We feel you there, speaking of hating our office isn’t loving Donald Trump. What do you think of him?
A danger to the world.
As much as I loathe him, I can understand why so many people voted for him. They aren’t ‘bad’ or ‘dumb’ or ‘deplorable’ as much as they are desperate.
The major media enterprises and big business are based on the coasts. That leaves a huge population (middle USA) that is largely ignored. They’ve seen their jobs and communities decimated and their cities and towns hollowed out, while the last 40 years of economic progress flow disproportionately to the ‘one percent’. So along comes a guy who says “I’ll save you” and like a drowning man clutching at a straw, they take it. I wonder how long it will be before they realise they have kicked their own goal?
What was last photo you took on your phone?
A photo of my dog at a friends birthday party… I was eating cake without sharing! My dog gives me a look that combines both cuteness and guilt for not sharing. She ends up with more cake than me.
See the bigger picture in the flesh:
Gary Sheppard
Mephisto
March 7th-26th
Black Eye Gallery
3/138 Darlinghurst Rd, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
10am-6pm
Words by Leah Teperski
