Recent Works: Owen Moyo and Joseph Mason Russell ~ Saturday 26th July – 17th August 2025

Conversation with the Artists & Gallery Tour

Curator’s Introduction

As a curator, one of the great privileges is bringing together artists whose practices differ in form but resonate deeply in spirit. This exhibition does exactly that – pairing the vivid, surreal characters and dreamlike energy of Joseph Mason Russell with the layered cultural narratives and textured vibrancy of Owen Moyo.

Joseph’s works are like psychological vignettes – moments captured not in realism, but in feeling. He transforms the mundane into the extraordinary, teasing stories from odd fragments of memory, found images, and subconscious play. His figures seem to emerge from another world – one we half-remember from dreams or déjà vu – rendered in glowing colour, humour, and subtle distortion.

In contrast, Owen Moyo’s paintings explore the human condition through colour, rhythm, and a powerful sense of heritage. Rooted in the traditions of Zimbabwean and Ndebele visual language, and shaped by his experience living in Australia, Owen’s works speak to plurality, movement, and cultural memory. His paintings are tactile and expressive – blending traditional forms with contemporary concerns in ways that feel both grounded and otherworldly.

Together, their works invite us to reflect on identity, belonging, and transformation – how we shape and are shaped by our environments, memories, and inheritances. I’m honoured to share this dialogue between two thoughtful, energetic, and entirely unique artists. I hope the exhibition opens new doorways for your own reflections – on art, on self, and on the shifting nature of the worlds we inhabit.

 

 

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Owen Moyo is an Australian painter who studies a range of subjects in the use of colour, texture and blending traditional styles with contemporary surreal expressionist forms. He explores the unlimited potential of the human condition and the technological world. The work is dynamic, multi-layered and dreamy, yet still maintains the traditional style of both his African background and European influence. He brings extensive mastery of colour theory, innate sense of rhythm and compositional elements to each painting.

Owen’s work contrasts to that of his father in producing paintings that embrace the cultural plurality of Sydney and rejecting the cultural expectations of fine art in his home country. On coming to Australia, Owen found his appreciation extended from the traditional mediums of watercolour and oil painting, to pop art, street art, found materials and indigenous art. These forms initially felt alien but in time impressed upon him the limitless nature of expression.

Moyo’s work is influenced by the Ndebele art form that developed in Zimbabwe as a coded protest against colonisation. His use of colour is heavily influenced by the work of William Kentridge, Michael Armitage, Wael Shawky,Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Neil Tomkins and so forth.

‘I paint at the intersection of tradition and surreal expressionism, where color and texture become tools to dissect the human experience in a technological age. My work is dynamic, layered, and deliberately unresolved, it draws equally from my African heritage and European training, yet refuses to be anchored by either. I wield color theory like a second language, using rhythm and compositional tension to build worlds that feel both familiar and unsettlingly new’

 

Joseph Mason Russell: I was born on Waiheke Island, raised in Auckland, and now live and create on Gadigal land in Sydney. My father is an artist and inspired me to draw and paint from the time I could hold a pencil. Since then I have been self taught, learning from painting alongside friends. My grandfather was a street mime and clown who traveled the world by sailboat. From him, I learned that expression can be strange, physical, and wordless. And with the subtle twitch of an eyebrow, or a contortion of the spine, a story can be told. This freakshow of the human experience inspires my work. Like his exaggerated gestures, I try to tell stories without words – to show, through subtle abstraction, distortion, and exaggeration, that the mundane can be bizarre and beautiful. I often start with colours that feel charged by some kind of underlying energy – a joke, an emotion, interactions, conversations, or visual stimuli from my day, or dreams.

I find life elaborate, extravagant, and exciting – but what interests me most are the small, mundane moments and objects in which a subtle, off-kilter oddity juts out and stops me in my tracks – lingers in my mind and nags at me for a reason I can’t quite make sense of. I hope to create this same feeling in the paintings I make. I want to let the painting speak for itself, leaving it to the viewer to find their own meaning; whether it excites, confuses, calms, or disturbs them.

So long as this object I create inspires the same interest I find in these day-to-day in-between moments, hopefully the painting can be its own odd moment – one that other people (and myself) can get that feeling from as well.