With its first foray into the contemporary, The Art Syndicate is pleased to present Nice is Different Than Good the Sydney debut of New York multimedia artist Gregory Uzelac. In lieu of the usual art speak, here are Uzelac’s thoughts on the collection:
From Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’ to Christopher Nolan’s ’Batman Begins’ to the political corrective reboots of today, art and entertainment has sprung from one question: “what would this look like in the real world?” Today the bar for suspension of disbelief has been lifted to a nearly unreachable height. Myth, folklore, fantasy, and science-fiction are forced to adhere to rationale while our real lives are sensationalized to sell us goods and beliefs that offer the understanding meant to come from metaphor. Twenty-first-century heroism is defined not by ends, but by means. We applaud vocabulary, fashion, and enthusiasm. We shun the forms of which we don’t approve. All the while, good and bad gets done right under our noses. We only realize when it’s too late.
We want escapism to be realistic and we demand perfection in reality. This show is about translating narrative in a way that doesn’t make sense straight away – that blends the two. By breaking down the narrative in color, contour, material, and words, I hope to remind you of the agency you have in interpreting narrative, and, therefore, the agency you have in writing your own.
Gregory Uzelac (b.1990) is an artist and writer from New York City. A multilingual son of immigrants, Uzelac’s work draws inspiration from the cultural hybridization of migration, mass media, and myth, which he uses to blend and usurp classifications in order to tell stories that cross identitarian divides. Uzelac received a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University in the US in 2013, and he is currently completing his Master of Fine arts at Sydney University. A transplant to Sydney, Uzelac also writes for stage and screen and is a staunch defender of pop sensation ABBA.