Opening Alan Young’s Canberra show
Matilda Trio, 2024
Presented at the opening of Spotlight on Sport, August 29, 2024, M16 Artspace, Canberra
If Alan Young had a motto, he might borrow from Nike: JUST DO IT.
That’s because there is a directness, an unambiguous quality about the works in the main M16 gallery (that you have discovered or are yet to discover) - the show he has called Spotlight on Sport.
What I have learnt, getting to know him and his practice (and writing the catalogue essay) is not to overthink things. Just get into it.
This is Alan’s first exhibition in Canberra since becoming an active visual artist 20 years ago from his home base in Hobart.
As fast-emerging AI takes hold in our machine-led world, it seems to me that there’s value in all of us doubling down on those talents and skills that only humans possess: spontaneity, touch, love, joy, creating with our heads and hearts in ways that aren’t about solving particular problems, according to particular ends - as computational machines work.
Alan’s energetic and colourful abstract canvases extend a language we might have experienced once we first discovered paint, when we first discovered mark marking before our inner voice became our inner critic.
His work leans into performance, he often paints to music, not something our ubiquitous machines, fed by data, do.
Processes are as important here as the image. For Alan Young, it’s where he finds joy and freedom.. purpose and dignity.
In celebration of sport, the 23 canvases express his passion for various ball sports - as a spectator - and in his own way, actual exercise.
Alan tells me that he doesn’t work side to side, left to right, but on an angle, or up and down. "..Like exercise... Like a run” -- as if he was on the field too, playing, sketching footwork across a field with his art tools.
There’s lots of running in the works… Running Matildas brown, angular, and solid stars.
There’s Australian striker Michelle Heyman; blond and horizontal amid other flying bodies on a square canvas field.
The works are Alan’s trademark panels of rarely-blended bold colour, angular figures, the odd, irregular text, here, with the additional drama of super competitive sport.
Different sports cluster and clang. Facets of sport including crowds and wagering create ecosystems of diagonal action.
Alan saturates canvases with one acrylic colour and then adds other bold colours, rarely blended oil sticks, or more acrylic, straight out of the tube, on the brush, sometimes dripping. There is no pencil draft, because as Nike declares, Just Do It.
In our pre-opening interview, Alan told me he ‘normally does a panel and then half a figure, then works on something else and comes back to it.’
He says he has fun in his studio workplace.
Humans, if we are to survive the Anthropocene and AI, must be adaptive and multimodal.
Alan takes his self-described disability - which impacts his balance, and can disorientate - and uses it to move in ways that many of us might not, when at the canvas.
In marketing and economics, it might be described, not as a disability, but as a comparative advantage. That’s what humans need to find in the face of an army of machines.
Well done Alan. From me and all those gathered here this evening, a warm congratulations as I declare the show opened.