Jon Cattapan

Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake … The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters.¹

This cycle of works has developed out of my obsession with urban identity and the information overload in our contemporary world. In these paintings the lights and constant transmissions of a generic city are painted as disembodied ‘bits’ of data that drift around the picture plane. These floating apparitions that are like steaming, skeletal cityscapes (datascapes?) emphasise the transition of established orders. The paintings are about electronic information/memory, circuitry, architecture—systems of information.²