SUPERMANKIND Recent Paintings by Dale Cox. Opened March 3 2020 Australian Galleries Melbourne

Click here to see many of the works in this exhibition.

Artists talk 3pm Saturday March 14 Australian Galleries Melbourne. This was the last mass gathering I myself attended before the COVID Pandemic changed everything. I was fortunate enough to get my show up and hung, audiences to attend, good sales made before the show was effectively cut in half and attendaences plummeted after 2nd week. I consider myself very fortunate and my heart goes out to the many artists I know- and so many more besides- who have had shows cancelled, postponed etc and incomes slashed.

Meanwhile however..... When it comes to the immediate climate emergency the world faces in the next decade, we are still pathetically 'shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic'. Climate change is very real, our biggest threat and our most urgent responsibility. We do not, as a single species, have the right to take the rest of our diverse planet down with us, and yet the defining characteristic of the Anthropocene is that we are doing just that.

Art has an essential role to play in acknowledging this fact and can address head on, the complex problems of this existential crisis in comprehensible, even poetic ways. This current exhibition seeks to convey the 'pointy end' of our predicament. Whilst humans have grappled with our inevitable death for thousands of years, we are perhaps amongst the first generations to contemplate not just our own finite existence, but the doomed fate of humanity itself. A kind of double death. Here we see our collective humanity stripped to our common element, the skeleton. As stewards of the Earth, we hold its fate in our hands, are we up to the task?