Laith McGregor

30 Jan-17 Mar ,

Photography

Can table tennis be art?

First published on 30 Jan 2012. Updated on 18 Mar 2012.

This event has finished

While you may remember him from those bearded biro creations that started popping up around Australian galleries a couple of years ago, Laith McGregor has been doing a whole lot more lately than befriending bearded men. “I haven’t been concentrating on beards for a while now,” he says. “Though I was growing one for a while there just so I knew what I was talking about.”

Ohne Title (Them Listless Folk from Apocryphal) is McGregor’s largest exhibition to date. The exhibition will fill both floors of Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art Gallery with paintings, drawings, sculptures, and a major video work, that explore memory, hypnosis and the unknown, and feature a strange little ghost named ‘Waterface’.

“Waterface is a character that appeared to me at a very young age,” McGregor says. “I’d see this ghost-like figure about the house, just kind of following me. His face was always moving - to me it looked like moving water. Now I realise that his face was always changing and morphing into multiple characters. I recently got hypnotised to see if I could recall anything significant about the character. I asked the hypnotist if I could film the process and he was into it!” The video of McGregor's hypnotism is featured in the exhibition.

Increasingly, McGregor is using improvisation and spontaneity in his art making. “Recently I’ve been attaching myself to this idea of the unknown,” he says. “I wanted to start this new body of work with absolutely no idea of what would come about, to see if that chance encounter or spontaneous mark-making could lead somewhere unknown and bring about new ideas.”

McGregor’s show will also include an interactive installation of sorts, ‘Pong Ping Paradise’. “I was using a ping-pong table in my studio as a workbench,” he says. “I had the idea in Berlin when I was looking at the graffiti table tennis tops over there. The tables would continuously change, be written on, cleaned, and then written on again. They were continuous moving works of art. I adopted the same principle, topped my workbench with a roll of paper, and would sketch, rant, quote lines, and physically work on it for the duration of one year. It became a diary of sorts, an open journal. Now it’s a functional table tennis table in the space. People can play on my ideas while reading my inner thoughts.”

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Words by Emily Herdman