Tony Curran's Colour Separations at Megalo is an absorbing exhibition

In the 2015 Archibald Prize, of the finalists, the one painting that really did not belong with the rest was titled Luke and was the work of Tony Curran.

Unlike most of the other paintings in the competition that sought to capture a likeness or a synthesis of the sitter's personality, Curran's Luke appeared like an image in transition, restless, multifaceted and difficult to pin down.

The attractive feature of Curran's exhibition at Megalo is its elusiveness - it suggests many things but is anchored to none - and the artist, while omnipresent, hides behind numerous collaborative facades. In rejecting a basic anthropocentric view of the world, where "man" is both the centre of the world and its master, Curran appears to view technology as the new glue that holds together, threatens and shapes the changing Deadshot universe.

In an attempt to rid himself of the baggage imposed by the hand, he draws on an iPad and explores the languages involved in computer communications.

The print Growth potential #1, 2019, the only clearly figurative image in the show, is of a toddler holding a mobile phone or some sort of screen in his hands. It is realised as an etching with aquatint and was printed at Megalo with the RGB colour model.

The origins of the image lie in a month-long residency that Curran undertook at Canberra's National Portrait Gallery where he sat in the Gordon Darling Hall with an empty chair opposite him. People were invited to sit down and he would draw their portrait on an iPad and would send it to them electronically.

He noticed that some of his sitters would give a screen to their baby children to amuse themselves while they posed for their portrait and hence created this print. A child who was too young to speak or walk was already mesmerised by the little screen.

Screens are designed as "attention machines" with huge profit incentives to keep the viewer glued to the screen for the longest possible time. While traditional pixels developed by Russell Kirsch were simple squares, modern computers have sophisticated pixels of different shapes, including triangles and lines, in an attempt to create screens that can seduce their users and hold their attention.

Curran decided to create his own pixels in the form of wiggly colour abstractions of red, green and blue that create a certain pulsating rhythm as demonstrated in his Dynamic Attention Machines diptych, 2021, displayed on LED screens.

There is also an impressive wall installation of these newly created pixels. If I have understood his purpose correctly, Curran is seeking an antidote to the attention absorbing screens, to create his own transcendental patterns that instead of consuming our attention will in a restful manner redirect the attention back to us so that we can disengage from the screen.

Like all good exhibitions, this one raises more questions than presents neat solutions.

The most effective piece, for me, at the show is the diptych on the screens. The concepts explored do not require the materiality of the physical print or a painting, but can happily exist in cyberspace as a digital image. In this exhibition, the exception to this observation is the little gem Signature #1, 2020, an artist's book, printed at Throwdown Press, Sydney.

Here the process of leafing through the book demanded a passage of time and that played with my reception of the piece and engaged my imagination to reveal the images.

Tony Curran's Colour Separations is an absorbing exhibition that questions the attention-grabbing technologies that surround us.