Dudley house is about to pop off

A NEW group show celebrating contemporary pop art in Bendigo is set to open next month at Dudley house.

Pop Goes the Easel will bring together eight local artists whose work deals with personal or political narratives expressed through the pop art genre.

Painter and show curator Chris Duffy said he hoped the show would give people an introduction to the current scene in Bendigo.

“I use ‘pop’ as a pretty broad term, it’s more about what’s going on with street art, pop art, pop surrealism, there’s a whole lot,” Duffy said.

“I wanted to have a small group show which features pop culture, in that building which will be the first time in Dudley house.”

The artists in the show include Duffy, Mr Dimples, Nacho Station, Dale Harris, Bridie Margaret O’Toole, Cody Dewit-Hayes, and Rayven Jane.

Their work differs stylistically, Duffy said, yet the thread uniting them is that they borrow from different art modalities and rely on relatable imagery to express their ideas, as pop art has done since its beginnings.

“Pop art when it started,” Duffy said, “Basically the thing was, the supermarket was the art gallery and the products became the art work and then it became socio-political as well.

“It’s still the same now but now we’ve got everything on here [the internet] and we just take everything.

“Everything’s the art gallery and the art product and there’s so many different ways of doing it and there’s so much on offer,” he said.

Pop Goes the Easel will feature large, bright works created to fill the space at Dudley House with the artists vision of what pop art can be.

“My objective was that it doesn’t get represented here in Bendigo and I wanted to represent it, I wanted to expose it to an audience that maybe thinks it’s a little tawdry or just copycat art,” Duffy said.

The show was made possible through the Bendigo Venue and Events grants program Artists on View Street.

Pop Goes the Easel will open on 10 February at 4pm at which DJ Crossfire will be playing 90’s hip-hop.

The show will be on for two weeks until 20 February