“Early Career Group Show”
Zac Segbedzi
5 July → 18 Aug 2018

Early Career Group Show brings together recent paintings (and other collateral) by Zac Segbedzi, alongside works by a number of his peers with whom he has had a close friendship and creative dialogue.

This is the first exhibition by Segbedzi in a public gallery and the artist has adopted a form of institutional critique; treating the exhibition as a museum-style career retrospective, only 6 years after finishing art school. Most of the featured paintings by Segbedzi were originally presented in off-site projects and, by bringing them into West Space, questions around how an artwork’s meaning circulates within gallery systems are raised. For example, who has the right / power to speak and think about art? etc.

Segbedzi’s painterly practice is stylistically excessive and built upon appropriating other painters, as well as mixing together cultural symbols and referents. A sense of cultural relativism – the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another – underpins the body of work.

Some of the project’s key themes include: navigating art history, the art market, Australian parochialism, identity politics, subculture and the potential for radicality, localism and internationalism.

West Space recognises that some of the imagery and textual elements of the project contains political content that may be offensive to some viewers – in particular, the artist’s references to the Holocaust and Nazism. Segbedzi’s work is critically engaged with ideas of shock tactics and the aestheticisationof violence, and the way politically sensitive material is often co-opted under systems of capitalism for material gain. For example, one textual element written by Segbedzi in first person states “I would rather be a fucking Nazi than a YBA”. This histrionic statement is a reflection on the ethics and values of the entrepreneurial Young British Artists (YBA), whose use of shock values in their art in the 1990s (and the associated derogatory UK tabloid press coverage it received) was an important component of their success.

This body of work also considers the divergent (and sometimes contradictory) ways that cultural symbols are treated in the realms of high culture versus mass media versus the market. For example, one painting features a copy of Angelfood McSpade, a satirical portrayal of a stereotypical black African woman by the 1960s counter culture figure and American comic artist Robert Crumb. Angelfood McSpade is one of Crumb's most notorious targets for accusations of sexism and racism, to which Crumb has responded that he did not invent racist caricatures like Angelfood, but that they used to be part of the American culture in which he was raised: “He saw the character as a criticism of the racist stereotype itself and assumed that the young liberal hippie/intellectual audience who read his work were not racists and would understand his intentions for the character.”

Finally, this body of work considers what it means to make art in Australia in the 21st century. In the September 1974 issue of Artforum, Australian art historian Terry Smith published ‘The Provincialism Problem’, a seminal text that argued that a world art system, centred on the New York art world, condemned artists elsewhere to misleadingly perceive their situation as necessarily subservient, and their art as lesser, secondary and dependent. Reflecting on this argument in 2017, Smith states that the provincialism problem has not been solved—it has, rather, been globalised then neoliberalised, and thus remains problematic.