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‘The In Residence’
Darren Knight Gallery at silvershot
1 - 12 July 2008

Existence –

I don't like living, I don't do it naturally. I make a mockery of it. Each hour I check, have I lost this day, have I lost to this day? A desperation for existence began early when I had the hopeful plan to capture another child and send her into the world as me, returning daily to report the details of my fulfilled life.

In my late 20s the plan turned to a kill. In taking another young female’s life I hoped some life-death-life transference would improve mine. I look for an existence to make mine everywhere, like a vampire. At night I wake and visualize my last seconds on earth (a strategy to shock me into life?). I imagine a hospital bed, looking out from half closed lids - a nurse passes. I mumble "I love you", the worthiest of lifes sentiments, or I say "I love your life", a vampire’s lusty demise. I also remind myself, if you are at home and feel you are about to die - leave the house, go to the footpath. Die amongst the living. Let them know in death, you lived.

I exaggerate –

Although the search to live somewhere/somehow continues. In the architectural interiors of others, in 60s and 70s source books, contemporary interior design magazines, furniture designs, decorative arts, textiles, crafts and designer fashions, I have insinuated myself, and made a way to be. I have noticed each of us has developed an individual culture of aesthetics, an inclination/preference for particular shapes and colors within our decor and dress. I search out these aesthetic cultures developed by other individuals, I have to inhabit these, to make a broader existence for myself, as my own expression of such is so constrained as to barely exist.

The In Residence –

The In Residence is the home of the In family of Japan, with concentric square wooden floors, macramé hangings and large green glass vessels. It exists.

- Diena Georgetti, Brisbane, June 2008

Even when existing is difficult, the instinct is to keep doing it. Strategies come into play, living is allowed to prevail. As an adult, as an artist, Diena Georgetti has found a way to achieve the hopeful plan of her childhood, sending cover versions of herself in painting form out into the world. A notebook entry from 2004 describes the encounters of “…the objects I make and their independent journeys into the world. Making moves I hesitate to. And what of those they make all friendly with? Inviting themselves into their lives, their homes. Did they return to another 'me'? A parallel me? Am I not so alone? Are these products go-betweens, SOSs? Or simple transmissions awaiting a receptor?” Diena’s paintings are not allowed to live unless they allow her to live – and those who also choose to live with these paintings, for a moment or a lifetime, are kindred spirits.

The artist is not a machine for making work. Art that is truthful must first be lived in before it can be given a chance to speak to us at all. Many craft a ‘personal style’ but rarer is the person who embraces and announces this aesthetic as tuned through many different frequencies, acknowledging that to be human is to have been many humans. The search for validation is the most human search. Where would we be without the expressions of others? An ‘ism’ does not form of its own accord. ‘Originality’ is the careful selection of influences. To be original is to have opened one’s self to everything, and painstakingly constructed a world in which one can be comfortable.

Diena Georgetti describes The In Residence as "the home of the In family of Japan, with concentric square wooden floors, macramé hangings and large green glass vessels." These architectural, interior and design elements, as well as motifs drawn diversely from popular and high culture, art and fashion inform the artist’s work. In each painting Diena uses these adoptions and adaptations, selections and suggestions to describe an idea, both visual and conceptual, which at its heart is uniquely hers.

'The In Residence' will include eight recent paintings by Diena Georgetti and will coincide with the opening of the survey exhibition Diena Georgetti - The Humanity of Abstract Painting, 1988 - 2008 at Monash University Museum of Art from 2 July - 6 September 2008, and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane from 18 October - 6 December 2008. Her work will be included in the upcoming TarraWarra Biennial 2008, Victoria, Australia, can be viewed in the touring exhibition The World in Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria (from 26 July 2008), and has previously been included in the exhibitions 21st Century Modern – 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia,  Adelaide; Australian Perspecta 1995, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and The Boundary Rider, 9th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1992). Georgetti’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Monash University Collection, Melbourne, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. This is her third exhibition with Darren Knight Gallery.