Discreet Music

Daniel McClellan is a Sydney-based abstract painter who approaches painting as a game, with rules and contexts to work within. His practice engages with music and architecture, disciplines that share interests in movement within constraints, notation, and structuring space and time. For Discreet Music, McClellan's first showing with Nasha, the artist responds to the gallery's three-story floorplan. The exhibition comprises four series of paintings, each made in response to different features of the building, a wall painting across the three floors, and an artist's book. Each floor contains one painting from each series, with the three floors functioning as variations of each other. The title references Brian Eno's seminal generative music album. Like Eno's use of tape loops and harmonic progressions to create evolving soundscapes, and like algorithmic approaches in architecture, McClellan employs rules and procedures to generate abstract works that can be adapted and modified over time. Systems and algorithms across all three disciplines create unique outputs from simple underlying structures.