Past Their Flesh
25 August -
6 September 2023
PSAS Gallery
22 Pakenham Street, Fremantle
Western Australia
PAST THEIR FLESH is a collaboration between Natalie Scholtz and Curtis Taylor. Paintings, drawings, installation and photography plays with shifting perspectives of First Nations versus ‘introduced’ bodies in contemporary Australia. ‘Scholtz and Taylor’s work brings us to a kind of body horror of colonised and racialised subjects. At the same time, the flesh is a nexus of ancestral lineages, relational processes, and resistant selves. Human and non-human bodies, objectified into “mere flesh” by imposed hierarchies – merging, blurring, seeping.’ Jessyca Hutchens (Palyku), Art Historian and Curator.
Natalie Scholtz extends a conversation with pluralistic identity, intersectionality and in-betweenness in Australia in a playful spar with Curtis Taylor’s investigation of identity, language and cultural frameworks. Scholtz, as a painter, and Taylor’s experience in videography, photography, and sculpture creates experimentation between both artists skillsets. in this dual exhibition PAST THEIR FLESH. the artists explore their respective cultures, backgrounds, pigments and disciplines. Through identifying, interpreting and blending fluid intersectionality with strong cultural bonds they examine the stratification of skin colour that held up the scaffoldings of segregation in Western Australia.