Imposter
Its unsolicited presence was a jolt.
Skewered and swinging on that alien protuberance,
Flamboyantly deliberate and wholly without purpose.
Incongruity incarnate, a malapropism staked into this site of shared import.
The space’s specifics lovingly committed to memory and
Easily recalled by us who now recoiled.
Our treasured space, fecund and clean and nourishing.
Now punctured by this blot, this gaudy knot of inappropriate reflections.
Bouncing forth discordant hues from surroundings not proximate.
This crude construct somehow disaffirming its very setting.
But we were not disturbed uniformly, our disquiet was polylithic.
Many made light, some made mockery, a few even affected affection.
Gradually these contrary postures were abandoned.
After the second one appeared,
And then the rest.
Julian Aubrey Smith is an artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. His practice is propelled by mining the conventions of traditional realist painting for new permutations. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from RMIT University in 2003 and completed a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. He is the recipient of the 2014 Nino Sanciolo Prize, an Australian Postgraduate Award and an Australia Council for the Arts New Work Grant. He has also taught drawing and painting for many years at various institutions including Latrobe College, Fitzroy Painting, RMIT University, The University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts.
