Troy Innocent, Delta, 2014, laser cut plywood and acrylic, 66 x 89cm
Troy Innocent’s solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery takes the concept of an interactive gallery space to a new dimension. Innocent’s hybrid language that exists within the rules and systems of a digital world is expressed through signs and symbols of the artist’s invention, creating an ongoing conversation with the gallery itself. In this space, the viewer becomes a part Innocent’s media landscape, experiencing a realm between digital and material, familiar and strange, virtual and actual, abstraction and reality.
Digital art can often be screen based, however Innocent focuses instead on the world of code, creating an interactive language that spans across sculpture, sound, programming, animation and installation. These landscapes incorporate viewers within the design, experiencing this mixed reality as a merging of real and virtual worlds where the physical and digital co-exist and interact.
Abstraction is explored through colour, form and space, but also through the concept of organising reality into a multitude of layers where each layer rearranges and abstracts the work further. Innocent is attracted by the idea of a post-digital society that no longer processes information through human experiences and values, but rather through a complex, self-reliant system, essential to this new abstraction.
Inviting the viewer into this world, Innocent drives this concept of a pliable reality, whether it is deconstructed, unfolded or pushing the boundaries within space itself to examine relationships between language, experience and code, creating a continuing dialogue into the abstraction of our own environment.
Innocent holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Animation and Interactive media, from RMIT University, Melbourne and completed his diploma of graphic design and postgraduate diploma of Animation and Interactive Multimedia at Swinburne University, Melbourne. His solo exhibitions include Asemic Writing 1 (2013) and Nine Signs for Ogaki (2012), both at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide; Tokyo Pop // Ludean Play, Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne (2011); Scenes from Ludea, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney (2006) and Ludea, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2005). Innocent has a strong public art practice, his projects include Zydnei, City of Sydney as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA)(2013); Urban Codemakers, City of Melbourne Laneways Comission (2010); Colony, Melbourne Docklands (2008); x-milieu, Federation Square Melbourne (2008) and Field of Play, Melbourne Docklands (2007). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at spaces such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Performance Space, Sydney and the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.