Dan ‘EARS’ O’Toole: Bending Light
Dan ‘EARS’ O’Toole is what many creatives aspire to be: an inter-disciplinary artist, not limited to one corner of the art world but instead able to bounce effortlessly between mediums, going wherever his creativity takes him.
O’Toole has made a name luoroor himself in the Australian art community – not just for his bizarrely alluring paintings, but for his beatmaking, film and photography. Known by both EARS and Captain Earwax, the Sydney native is perhaps best regarded for his paintings that begin with Polaroid or 35mm photographs which are distorted with various objects. The subsequent photograph is then used as a reference during the painting process, where the subject is likely to take on an even more otherworldly form. Though sometimes O’Toole’s paintings come straight from his imagination, his photography is often the starting point or catalyst for his work.
In 2015, O’Toole spoke to fluoro about his exhibition Tree Spirits, a series of landscapes inspired by the Australian bush during a trip by the artist to Benalla. Since then, O’Toole has seen his work move away slightly from the public murals and street art that brought him acclaim to more of a collection of gallery specific works. “It’s just not something I have heaps of time for,” he says. “I’m making experimental videos and sound and painting in the studio and doing photography and other projects. I still love it…but I’m not running around at night with spraycans on my bicycle looking for sweet spots to bomb.”
O’Toole, in recent years, has made a more pronounced shift towards his development as a musician. His sound – ambient, sometimes glitchy electronica – is not merely a side project: he has been making music for 14 years, has been running his own label and has just finished an album entitled Delicate Empires which he says will be released in the coming months.
The product of a musical family – O’Toole’s mother was a jazz singer, while his father was a blues guitarist and his brother a musician as well – he began his foray into music at an early age, picking up the violin at age six.
In addition to producing music, O’Toole has tried his hand at making music videos, recently creating a clip for Sydney hip-hop staple Rapaport. He says that, for music videos, he is often given near-free reign to turn the musician’s sound into a visual experience.
“I suppose my angle is just like more of a video art, fine art perspective on film clips,” he explains. “And I create more left-of-centre stuff that feels like an interpretation of the music from my perspective.
“I’m not really about working to briefs too much where they want me to do a specific thing, I’m not that kind of technician. I’d rather just do my own thing and if they like me as an artist enough to trust that then, cool, we work together. If not, no worries.”
O’Toole’s upcoming exhibition, “Bending Light”, takes some inspiration from his time spent as a musician, adding another faithful entry into his body of escapist work. The images are a series of distorted portraits that, through O’Toole’s process of photographic manipulation, are an experiment into the ways that light, form and colour can be used to shift reality.
While Tree Spirits was based on sketches, this exhibition is solely centred around photographs that the artist has taken in recent months. Though the exact science behind the photographs is a secret, O’Toole was kind enough to show fluoro the process on our recent trip to his studio.
The photographs within Bending Light, like the music that O’Toole creates, contain an otherworldly, abstract quality – something that is meant to transport people. If there is a cohesive theme across O’Toole’s work, it would be exactly that: his ability to take viewers into realms different from what they may be used to.
“It’s pretty trippy,” he says about another recent project entitled Cycles that he says is meant to offer a look at the space between life and death. The accompanying video was made by filming drops of coloured liquid splashing slow-motion into water at 50 FPS. And the result, he says, is a meditation on the idea of reincarnation, or the transition between lives.
“I guess that’s my goal is to create a drug-like or transcendental experience for people, it’s kind of escapist.”
Bending Light will be shown at Juddy Roller Studios in Melbourne until Saturday 17 June, 2017. Click here to have a listen to his recent single Vortex, which will be on his upcoming album ‘Delicate Empires’. Set for release on Monday 14 August 2017 via Fifty Records.
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