Everything combines digital animation and 3-D computer modelling with video, photography and abstract painting. The virtual microcosm Alwast presents in the work is an entirely constructed digital ‘stage’ where potentially anything can be included. As the artist describes, the idea for the work stemmed from an experience of sitting at his computer, shifting his gaze between the screen and the view out his window to a car park, while a variety of web-cam images flashed across the screen. It was the ‘simultaneity of the mediated distant images brought to proximity, and direct spatial experience of the car park made distant’ that suggested an alternative way to perceive binary oppositions such as those between day and night, inside and outside, private and public, proximity and distance.
Alwast works across a range of different disciplines including painting, drawing and video. In Everything, he depicts the connections between these different media and, by channelling them all through the medium of digital animation, they are presented as ‘equivalents’. The range of different forms depicted in the work also suggests a dispassionate, yet poetic, consideration of wider societal issues such as urban development, mass-marketing and consumerism, while also privileging the role of memory and the personal within real and virtual spaces.
Peter Alwast trained as a painter and channels what he terms ‘painterly enquiries’ through new media technologies such as 3-D animation. His works draw upon a wide variety of imagery to create fictional spaces that reference public spaces and private memories. Alwast graduated from the Queensland University of Technology in 1997 and was awarded a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 1998 to undertake a Masters of Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design, New York. He was also the recipient of Parsons School of Design’s important Oscar Kolin Fellowship. Alwast has exhibited at the George Petelin Gallery, Gold Coast; Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney; and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and has been included in group exhibitions in New York and New Jersey, United States.
