Living together is easy

source: artlink

Living Together is Easy provided a loaded and irony-laden title and thematic framework for a recent exhibition juxtaposing Australian and Japanese artists’ work. Borrowed from a David Rosetzky artwork, the title was suggestive of the tensions between the commercialised rhetoric of lifestyle and togetherness that we are fed through the channels of everyday global capitalism, and the increasing alienation and xenophobia experienced by individuals living under this increasingly ‘easy’ (read: ‘coercive’) socio-cultural agenda. This tantalisingly juicy theme provides a compelling context for much current, culturally-engaged contemporary art, and co-curator Jason Smith noted a ‘spirit of creative activism’ as a motivator for the exhibition’s rationale. A joint venture between the NGV and Tokyo’s Art Tower Mito, the exhibition’s theme also provided some interesting food for thought vis-à-vis the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural collaboration, setting the stage for some interesting juxtapositions between the Australian and Japanese artists’ works.
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source: suttongallery

Born Melbourne 1970; Currently lives and works Melbourne

David Rosetzky works predominantly in video and photographic formats, creating scenarios in which human behaviour, identity, subjectivity, contemporary culture and community come under intimate observation. He has been making portraits since the early 1990s, using the format to explore relationships between interiority and exteriority, reality and fantasy, authenticity and artificiality. Technically and aesthetically precise, Rosetzky’s work is stylised, moody and strikingly beautiful, and resembles the idealised images found in high-end advertising and screen culture.

‘Over the last decade … [Rosetzky] has quickly and quietly amassed one of the most coherent, nuanced and interpretatively resonant bodies of work in the country. Single-minded and singular in approach, the hallmark of his practice is an intensely self-aware contemporary emotional mannerism.’