Johl Dwyer, Colour Tower, 2022
Resin, steel, oil and acrylic. 80 x 80 x 2200mm.
Johl Dwyer approaches colour as another artist might the ready-made. In colour, all elements of the artwork coalesce: concept, process, form, content, space, and affect become unified, while those boundaries that seem most fixed, as between liquid, solid and gas, or the object and its environment, seem to disintegrate.
His stacked cube sculptures are made by curing coloured pigments in resin, a material Dwyer describes as being “as close to ‘nothing’ or ‘air’ as possible” – unobtrusive, that is, but still rife with potential for unpredictable fluctuations and chance effects.
Colour Tower stands in counter to the grey, imposing cell towers that its tall form recalls, structures that disrupt the ecosystems they inhabit, both aesthetically and physically. Dwyer’s work, in contrast, seeks to be an expression of that ecosystem and a monument to its elemental power.
Using a palette of colours selected from the surrounding landscape, the sculpture might appear to have been formed spontaneously by the air itself – by a gulf-wind passing through and miraculously stilled in these cube forms, and with it, primordial motes of light, sea, sky and bush.
