Oblique Objects explores concealment as a visual and poetic strategy in figurative painting. Drawing on subcultural aesthetic lineages of secrecy and highlighting painting’s capacity for latency, the exhibition enlists a queer opacity as its conceptual modus operandi and consists of a body of paintings in which discernible pictorial and conceptual veils hide a furtive erotics in plain view. Throughout the work, motifs such as curtains, cloaks and surreptitious peepholes represent conspicuous visual obstructions. These apparent concealments augment the work’s conceptual obfuscations wherein narrative ambiguity, compositional schisms and occult hieroglyphs signify the withholding of information and engender layers of visual intrigue.

TIM PHILLIPS was born in 1991 in South Australia and grew up on Ngunnawal Country, Canberra. In 2012, he completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours at the Australian National University. He has exhibited nationally and in The Netherlands, and in 2014 completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris as part of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. He lives and works on Gadigal Country, Sydney.

Tim Phillips is a Higher Degree by Research Candidate, completing his Doctor of Philosophy.