Aston Philip
Artist’s profile
Aston Philip is a painter from Sydney Australia, now living and working in New York. His work has been exhibited across Australia, most recently at Campbelltown Art Centre and Goulburn Regional Gallery. Previously his paintings have been included in notable exhibitions at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Galarie Pompom, Gallery 9, and Artspace in Sydney. Aston exhibited at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, as the culmination of a one-year artist residency in December 2018. Drawing from Rachel Carson’s legacy in the ecological discourse, and through the exploration of physical and ephemeral modes of painting, his work ventures across new trajectories in technical painterly process, stressing that there are only interconnectedness and no separate unit of art or life.
Aston received a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first-class honors from Sydney University. He has also been an artist in residence at Hafnarborg Centre for Contemporary Art in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland and at Bundanon in the pristine hinterlands of the Shoalhaven in South Eastern Australia.
“I approach painting as a boundary-shattering examination of interconnectivity.
My works address the audience without the use of shock, diminishing notions of otherness. This approach seen in relation to mass culture is avant-garde.
The practice of art-making that champions joy, healing, and love is revolutionary.
My practice draws on extensive histories of painting reconfigured by ecological thinking. I have long been driven to make work reflecting contemporary society’s relationship with the natural world. Recently I am more open to seeing my practice as a way of coping with the state of this relationship, to healing it, rather than as a commentary or critique. I am interested in exploring crossovers in knowledge between Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, Symbiosis and how breakthroughs in understanding the flexibility of these systems could assist in democratizing the economy toward Earth Justice as well as general human, plant, and animal well being.”