Marc Blake’s first solo exhibition at Milford Galleries in Dunedin showcases an emerging artist with an absolutely unique and intriguing art practice. Crossing the boundaries of painting and drawing, landscape and surrealism, two dimensional surface and perspectival space, past and future, Blake explores the world of dream, memory and everyday reality.

On first glance his works appear simple - sublime, calm, sparse landscapes in which figures, trees, animals and boats almost float in ethereal space. On closer inspection, the layers of meaning, compositional elements and narratives begin to reveal themselves and the tension between the controlled and uncontrollable becomes apparent. Objects are symbols, motifs are cultural and historical signifiers and figures are characters, all involved in a dynamic and compelling composition.

Blake explores the opposing nature of illusion and reality. Like a Japanese printmaker he manipulates the surface pattern to show the viewer both flatness and depth. In The Value of Persistence, he plays with the illusionary space, not only alluding to a landscape in the grain of the wood and the placement of the symbolic elements but also in the expressive and vivid, profile landscape that although floating, finds a solid grounding in the depth of the illusional space. This landscape here suggests the development of a signature style, demonstrating Blake’s ability to introduce an element that is abstract in nature (yet remarkably representative of wild and unruly bushland) seamlessly and successfully in to a work that is so tightly constructed. Status Update shows a young woman with a cell phone in her hand carried away in her own illusionary world – a cyber space.

Time is a theme that is recurrent throughout Blake’s work. There is a melding of historical and futuristic elements and in one illustrated moment he captures the past, present and future. Blake talks of ‘Re:Generations’ as being “one moment in the infinite cycle of life” yet in that moment all time is revealed. Ghostly figures recede into the background like memories, the sky becomes a mix of dusk and dawn and the seasons change the leaves of a tree from green to gold. Everything I Can do to Remember talks of changing memories over time. Here a young woman takes a photograph on her cell phone of a horse that seems to slowly fade into the background. Are things ever as we remember them to be?

Status Update is a powerful and thought provoking exhibition of works that transcend reality, yet reflect directly on our everyday modern world.