Honky Tonks in the city has been showing art with something worth saying on its walls – an effective way of promoting local talent while providing punters with something decent to look at while knocking back respectable craft beer.
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I happened to be doing that a few weeks ago with Canberra artist Jordan Chik, who was giving me the rundown on a striking work he was exhibiting which combined motifs from Japanese woodblock prints with an arresting graphic edge. This was fine with me as first-rate art in combination with good quality liquor should stimulate the senses in a desirable way.
Canberra city needs more of this kind of thing to liven the place up a bit with spaces made available for emerging visual artists to show their work outside of a formal gallery setting.
Even better, Chik's work opened up thoughts on how music and art interweave in popular culture to negate horrible background noise that accentuates intrusion before desire.
"Music has a great influence on my art," Chik says. "It provides energy in the most primeval way which influences other disciplines comprised of style, settings, characters and ultimately stories. In that way, music and illustration for me are analogous. I consider myself of the grunge era, so most of the time I'm listening to old favourites like Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine.
"Lately I have been getting more into DJ music because I like the way it mixes samples of old and new music with music from different cultures, often in a funky way and with an emphasis on bass."
It is well accepted that we live in a crossover culture where various artistic forms play off each other in a single work and Chik's art gave me that visceral post-modern thrill with the senses teased by a bunch of styles feeding into a personal vision. This made the work on display at Honky Tonks an enticing visual experience.
"That piece started as a stylistic exercise which evolved into an exploration of darker themes such as inner turmoil and insecurity," Chik says. "While that formed the base, part of the central theme was to portray those themes in a way that was also playful. If I had to give it a name I'd call it Japanese graffiti, with a Western angle."
With this in mind, stylistic diversity that is attention-grabbing and meaningful is fast becoming a significant feature of inner-city Canberra and deserves greater prominence for all the right reasons.
The promotion of contemporary art that takes people beyond the crass "all surface and no substance" ideal driving commercial entertainment needs to be replicated elsewhere so that the current "hip" Canberra city tag is justified.