Deep North

“Deep North isn’t meant to be explained in any spe­cif­ic sense so our audi­ences are meant to pon­der their own asso­ci­a­tions. But Deep North has always implied some­thing like Deep South does for the Yanks. The anti­thet­i­cal zone of repres­sion and the uncon­scious, and today this Deep North goes off shore in the direc­tion of Nau­ru and Manus Island. But none of the works in the show illus­trate this anti­thet­i­cal except as abstract ‘’objec­tive corol­lar­ies’’. To use Elliot’s phrase Deep North should be dis­cussed as an atmos­phere, though of course shot through with my own mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ence.” – Mike Parr, 2015

Deep North includes mixed media works on can­vas and recent and his­tor­i­cal pho­to­graph­ic series span­ning four decades of practice.

Inter­ro­gat­ing for­mal and cul­tur­al ortho­dox­ies, Mike Parr con­flates media: draw­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, print, sculp­ture and per­for­mance in his work. Test­ing the lim­its of his phys­i­cal and men­tal endurance, Parr has cut, brand­ed, stitched, burned and nailed his body in a decades-long exam­i­na­tion of iden­ti­ty and polit­i­cal con­ven­tions of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. His works address psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic and social issues rang­ing from his own phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ty to the lega­cies of Marx­ism, from Aus­tralian refugee crises to the struc­ture of language.