Will Colenso ‘Proper Gander’

PROPER GANDER

I think there’s a quiet comfort to be found in the way our memories fade over time. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to find ways to interpret and record this wonderfully strange language of inaccuracies. Writing memories down seems to solidify them too much and strip them of some of their magic - so I’ve never really been one to keep a journal. But like most people, I fairly mindlessly save thousands of photos and screenshots in my phone. As I scroll back through them, each photo becomes a single frame in a much larger moving reel. A scattered and chaotic collection of fragments that, as a whole, provide a candid and sometimes confronting impression of a particular period of time. Photographs, other paintings, landscapes, portraits, nudes, details, corners of things, images sent from friends, internet detritus- the disarming honesty of an un-curated archive. These paintings are memory objects built out of those fragments. Hopefully unrecognizable but strangely familiar. Imagined still lifes of a not so still life.

Will Colenso, 2023

Will Colenso

• Born 1990, Brisbane
• Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

EDUCATION

2015

• Master of Architecture, RMIT, Melbourne

2011

• Bachelor of Architectural Design, University of Queensland

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024

• 'Proper Gander', EDWINA CORLETTE, Brisbane

2023

• 'Elsewhere', AK Bellinger Gallery, Inverell

SELECTED ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIENCE

2022

• Koning Eizenberg, Los Angeles

2018

• MAD Architects, Los Angeles

2017

• Zaha Hadid, London

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2023

• Amber Creswell-Bell Selects, National Emerging Art Prize, Sydney

PRIZES AND AWARDS

2023

• Finalist, Amber Creswell-Bell Selects, National Emerging Art Prize, Sydney

2012

• Nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects President's Medals