The Australian Dream and other Fictions: Andy Quilty’s Happy Meals & Scooter Skids: Art from the outer suburbs at FORM Gallery

by Jess van Heerden.

Andy Quilty is not into frills. Happy Meals & Scooter Skids: Art from the outer suburbs takes pride in its resolved rawness. It cuts through the C.R.AP. (classism, righteousness, and anti-pluralism) that has a tendency to haunt the scene we know and love. Yet, there is no sign of the toxic masculinity that such violently grounded, formally focused work frequently harbours. Instead, we see worries, triumphs, wishes, and walks home beaming from white cube walls in tongue-in-cheek earnestness. The Perth Festival project represents a collaboration between prolific so-called Western Australian artist and educator Andy Quilty and students from three of Boorloo’s outer suburban schools, Youth Futures Community School Midland, Armadale Senior High School, and Warnbro Community High School. The FORM exhibition runs alongside its counterpart at Midland Junction Arts Centre and will later tour to the Kim Fletcher Gallery in Armadale, finally ending its run in Rockingham (where Quilty is based and has lived all his life).
        Quilty’s three solo works, Car Crash (“I’m gonna call Howard Sattler”) (Safety Bay Rd), Flag Man (Frangipanis) (Axminister St), and Surf Bogan (Shark Chopper get F***ed) (Palermo Cove) are a mesmerising force. Clashing elements sit at odds to create densely layered chaos. Surf Bogan, for example, is something like a warped vignette with its careful ink shading pressing inwards from the upper right and bottom left-hand corners. Yet this gradient frame cannot contain the formal and tonal explosions that undermine the paper’s rectangular frame. This work is more portal than page. Expressive, directional linework instils the fidgety figures with movement and life. The varied marks and dense layering that renders the ambiguous subject matter, creates the impression that it cannot hold still. Scratched markings give the impression that the subject matter is uncertain in its person or objecthood, as if the disembodied screaming mouth, laser-shooting eyes, and raised middle finger only rest briefly in formation and could flicker quickly back into unrecognisable abstraction. The triad of improvised drypoint scratchings reflects what Quilty refers to as ‘outer suburban archetypes’, critical of lingering stigmatisation that outer suburban experience frequently encounters. Exhibition text explains that Flag Man and Surf Bogan describe persons the artist passed when driving to the beach. The third drypoint, Car Crash, emerges in response to  an informative experience for Quilty. A single-vehicle crash tragically killed his teenage friend—incorrectly reported in the news as a stolen vehicle in accordance with negative assumptions frequently made about outer suburban youth. Quilty explains that while working as a labourer after finishing high school, his boss (who was aware of Quilty’s close friendship with the deceased) told him casually that he attended the crash as a volunteer firefighter and his friend’s body was split in half. The artist recalls ‘that he so nonchalantly shared this with me, indicated the frequency with which he attended these scenes and implied the notion that I have come across in outer suburbia: that your feelings can go and get f***ed.’ 
        Quilty’s mundane, suburban subject matter—with works featuring metamorphosed sneakers, Quicksilver-esque designs, crucifixes, eyes, knees, mechanical parts, and waves—offers points of departure from which sets of encoded beliefs are unravelled. It is evident that Quilty has likewise encouraged students to do the same, drawing from their day-to-day experiences and trials to inform their artmaking. Visualising daily experiences—without dressing them up for viewers—is an impulse throughout the exhibition. Works feature scattered assortments of popular cartoons, barking dogs, and fast-food products in a manner that mimics the meandering jumping of conversations between close friends. Like exchanges that occur within intimate friendships, works range from addressing pressing fears—like looming financial pressures, living up to a family member’s expectations, and the drive to make sense of oneself – to trivial toss-ups like what the change in your back pocket will get you for dinner. Also apparent throughout the exhibition is the influence of the experimentalism with which Quilty approaches mark-making. Quilty’s skill as an artist is matched by his capacity to inspire and guide as an educator. The most informative class I took during my undergraduate degree was Quilty’s Drawing Foundations. Whether peppering A2 sheets with staccato, easel-rocking pencil jabs, turning the pencil around to its but and producing blunt, red-tainted impressions, or taking up the neon pastel just handed to him by a volunteer and slashing across a delicately shaded biro portrait (to a chorus of sharp, auditable gasps), his passion for the mark was infectious. It is clear in Happy Meals and Scooter Skids that the same fever has taken hold. Each work contains evidence of unique assemblages of delicately twisting wrists, careful blocking-out, haphazard rubbing, slow shading, tessellating pressure, and decisive linework.
        Kaden’s Police, the first work to greet visitors, is a graphite and gouache monotype print on Fabriano paper. It contains a carefully rendered police van, complete with dark hubcaps, tinted windows, and the tell-tale checkered stripe. Yet the law-and-orderly scene is inverted in two fell swoops. Confident curves—perhaps traces of a side-held pencil or a blunt plastic item—mimic burnouts’ inconsistent scorch mark remanence. Combined with the van’s positioning in the upper third of the page, this clever variation gives the probably stolen car a burst of explosive movement. Untitled, Precious, Kyle, Chase, and Ashton’s collaborative ink monotype and drypoint print from found cardboard on paper, adopts a different approach altogether. The 84 x 59.5 cm page encloses several distinct prints that clash and harmonise in turn to create an unpredictable synthesis of implied textures. The image celebrates imperfection to indicate the past lives of the recycled material employed in the print’s making. Clearly rendered in ink, the imprint of torn paper at the centre and bottom left of the work leaves a particularly striking gradient beside jet-black ink blocks. In the prints that make up the right section of the work, carefully sketched figurative drawings tumble into abstraction through layers of interlocking linework. The experimentation continues with a series of five recycled McDonalds packaging monoprints. Rima’s Medium Fries, for example, is an ink monotype that interrupts the smooth surface of McDonald’s packaging with soft, wiggly swirls, boldly skeltered linework, and assertive fingerprints. Medium Fries sits adjacent to Kaden’s quartet of oil marker and solvent transfer on Fabriano paper, LAW and ORDER, HOME OWNER, PATROLE, and INSURANCE. Kaden, whose family Rockweiler is coincidently walked past Andy’s house most days, has created a series of striking portraits. Minimal linework and shading suggest the curves of noses, cheekbones, and tightly sealed lips or downcast eyes. Each expressive face is superimposed over images that might be grouped as outer suburban iconography, including an aging Ford, a police car, and a single-story, tree-less property with a neatly kept lawn.
        A group show featuring collaborative and individual works by teenage high school students is fated to contain some variance. Remarkably, however, not a single work of the forty-five selected contains homogenous mark-making. Artistic inventiveness and creative approaches make each work an interesting and sophisticated formal investigation. This implicit playfulness should not be taken to suggest, however, that the content is not taken seriously by Quilty or the student artists. While often depicted cheekily, students’ day-to-day experiences are not dismissed as insignificant or ridiculed in a The Castle-esque manner of quasi-sincerity (to draw from Quilty’s analysis of the popular film in his masters thesis). This is felt in the pointed sense of ‘outside-in’ that characterises the exhibition, a sensation that is far from coincidental. Although holding their own as formally innovative fine art objects, it feels as if these works have been brought into the gallery space upon relocation from alternative environments, ‘out there’, to which they belong. Quilty and Andrew Nicholls’ (who worked on the show as supporting curator) use of crude construction materials to hang works further encourages one to notice the disparity between the mundane, sometimes gritty realities of outer suburban kids and the imagery that typically graces gallery walls. Is it not a curious conditionality that allows many so-called Australian gallery goers to cling to a supposedly collective (highly problematic) hills hoist heritage, yet find themselves surprised to meet such down-to-earth subject matter in a gallery context? This irony is not lost on Quilty.
        Beneath the exhibition’s laid-back façade is an examination of lingering prejudice, so fittingly placed in Claremont, the beating heart of Perth’s upper classes. Quilty’s project reminds art viewers of the often-unspoken class boundaries we like to think have been dissolved. Happy Meals & Scooter Skids is a mark-making masterclass, but equally, beneath the fun and games, addresses patterns of exclusion within art world mechanisms. It asks, more simply, who is actually welcome.

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Image credits:

1.  Andy Quilty and Armadale Senior High School Students, Nike flowers and shopping trolley (detail), 2024, drypoint print on Fabriano paper, 76 x 56 cm. 
2. Courtesy of FORM Gallery.
3.  Chase, Kyle and Precious, Youth Futures Community School Midland, Untitled (detail), 2024, Ink monotype and drypoint print from found cardboard on paper, 84 x 59.5 cm.