Dennis McCart

Exhibitions 2019-2022

Drawing Between Worlds (machine learning and the human hand) Catalogue

Drawings that provide moments of misrecognition and yet unnerving beauty. Dennis McCart’s art practice reflects the ambiguity between our inherent connection to the natural world and the continual distancing from it.

McCart continues to use a machine learning algorithm known as a generative adversarial network in his art practice. Feeding data sets into the algorithm of landscape scenic imagery sourced locally from south-east Queensland liminal landscapes to more pristine environments such as the Bunya Mountains. Each generation of the algorithm producing new complex landscapes based on the input data. This process provides McCart with new insights and connections to grow and expand his art practice in mediums of drawing, painting and animations.

‘I have found this process challenges my preconceptions and artistic biases and opens up a new way to represent both the physical and digital environment’ – Dennis McCart 2023

Ephemerality 2022

Dennis McCart's exhibition presents a unique reflection on the landscapes edged by the Brisbane River, with the video and painting works providing a meditative exploration of the ever-changing relationship that this waterway has with human habitation and nature. It reminds us to maintain an appreciation for the life that brims within the river, further connecting us to the deep spiritual ties of Aboriginal peoples to its course. This exhibition stands as a powerful testament to retaining reverence for these unique places now and in years to come.This exhibition respectfully acknowledges the First Peoples continued spiritual and cultural connection to Maiwar (Brisbane River).

29 May - 5 June 2022 hours - 11am - 5pm Sunday to Sunday

The Ferryman’s Hut. Metro Arts

29 Macquarie Street, Teneriffe QLD, 4066, Australia.

The Uncertainty Principal 2021

At the start of 2019, I began to experiment with generative adversarial networks (GANS) within my practice. GANS have allowed me to create new visual works that combine elements of digital industrial sites, fringe landscapes around Brisbane River and urban-rural borders while also incorporating my own paintings and photographs. Part of the delight of this process is creating works that are brimming with unexpected beauty and intricate detail rarely encountered in traditional fine art practices. I'm excited to see where this journey takes me in terms of developing new aesthetics and art forms the technology brings forth.

The Uncertainty Principal exhibition Land Street Gallery

Land Street Gallery + Studio 6 Land Street, Toowong, QLD, 4066, Australia.

Contested Landscapes 2020

These landscape artworks evoke an understanding of the fleeting emotion of sadness. By mixing contemporary elements with a lost sense of Romantic idealism, they form a unique representation of what life is like in the anthropogenic epoch. Within the works one can observe a beautiful combination of nostalgia and lamentation, as if they were both responses to and interpretations of our current reality - one that weaves together shared memories with self-reflection. The landscape paintings provide an opportunity to reflect on modern society, while also reminding us of our past - thus allowing us to explore not only the beauty of our current landscape, but also possibilities for how it could be different.

Redland Art Gallery, Redlands,Brisbane.

Murmur of Faded Landscapes 2019

My expanded paintings of 2019 interpret and contextualizes marginal landscapes. Consisting of two parts; a series of static representational oil painting and animations projected onto static large drawings. Using expanded painting and drawing practice the artist reinterprets landscapes of the urban fringe, sites of abandonment and accrual.The artworks are palimpsest landscape collages of time and decay, in a metaphysical sense sites of forgetting and remembering.

Some Kind of Nature exhibited at the Tattersall’s Club Landscape Art Prize, Tattersall’s Club Brisbane, Riverside Centre, Brisbane 2019.

It is solved by walking exhibited at the Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition 11 January - 11 June, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

The Long Walk Home exhibited at the Rotary Art Spectacular, Central Plaza One Brisbane CBD.

Grey Street Galleries, South Bank Queensland College of Art

Unregulated Spaces 2016

Unwatched and disregarded there are landscapes that sit along the fringes of our cities and suburbs, the freeway overpasses and verges; scrublands; railway lines; bridges; transmission towers; creeks and abandoned quarries a world away from the landscapes of our ideal holiday destinations. They are often invisible to most of us regardless of their close proximity to our doorstep. However, it is in these concealed and overlooked spaces that certain things thrive and a true kind of wilderness can be found.

2016 | March | Unregulated spaces, Redlands Regional Art Gallery, Cnr Middle and Bloomfield St, Cleveland