Dundas St Gallery

FROM PALETTE TO CANVAS

A TREVOR JONES RETROSPECTIVE ON NIFTY GATEWAY

​24 FEB 2021

DUNDAS STREET GALLERY 

This retrospective exhibition and the artwork that it’s built around draws attention to the relationship between the digital and physical. I would like this show to capture and express the value of it as physical paintings being absolutely integral to the process. The physical transforms into the digital, something entirely different and unique in how they’re engaged with and consumed: images on a screen, NFTs, or digital artworks in a exhibition in the metaverse. 

One way to look at it is that my USP is my process – physical to digital. I begin with the paint, the palette, the canvas and the art that emerges from this then transcends the physical and becomes, through new processes, the digital. This process can be most easily observed when a bold statement, such as a brick and mortar exhibition is organised and documented.   

I hired the Dundas Street Gallery in Scotland’s capital to display the paintings in this retrospective exhibition even though the UK is in full Covid lockdown and I couldn’t have an opening night and no one could come to see the artwork anyway. It was important to display the paintings in a gallery, to photograph them in situ and to talk about the artwork on camera, even though no one else could come to see them. I don’t know what the future holds for us with this current Covid pandemic and I don’t know when my next exhibition in a gallery will take place; therefore, I was compelled to organise this show, to experience once again the excitement of hanging the artwork, then sitting back afterwards to enjoy the paintings with a glass of wine. 

Below are some of the photographs taken from the gallery set up and ‘exhibition opening’.