Photo: Tom Woods

CHARLIE DON'T SURF

Charlie Don’t Surf explores generational relationships with imagery and visual culture, considering how associations adapt and alter over time. In a departure from the miniature paintings in oil and encaustic Golden is best known for, large-scale sumi watercolour and ink works reimagine found photographs and illustrations to embody an interrelation between past and present.

Appropriating the exhibition title from a line in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which in turn became the title of a song by the Clash, Golden’s new series of paintings use photographs of American soldiers surfing during the Vietnam War as a visual reference, juxtaposed with found illustrations from retro Science Fiction. Influenced by Sontag’s 1965 essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, Golden explores cultural anxieties in relation to visual culture; by painting the ‘unthinkable’ – be it conflict, apocalypse or a long lost time-period – the artist exposes universal concerns of the human psyche.

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Pamela Golden - Shoe fly, dragon fly, get back to your mother, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Shoe fly, dragon fly, get back to your mother* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye of a hurricane that's abandoned, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye of a hurricane that's abandoned* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 250 cm]

Pamela Golden - Procession of the equinoxes, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Procession of the equinoxes* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 110 cm]

Pamela Golden - Cause I understand you've been running from the man that goes by the name of the Sandman, 2015. — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Cause I understand you've been running from the man that goes by the name of the Sandman* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 250 cm]

Pamela Golden - Waiting for the axe to fall, 2015. — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Waiting for the axe to fall*
[Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 110 cm]

Pamela Golden - Walkin' along the river road at night, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Walkin' along the river road at night* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - From the land of the rising sun, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *From the land of the rising sun* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - Looks like we're in for nasty weather, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Looks like we're in for nasty weather* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden painting - Analogous sequence in different parts, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Analogous sequence in different parts* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 110 cm]

Pamela Golden - So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - There's a bad moon on the rise, 2015. — © Pamela Golden (2015) *There's a bad moon on the rise* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - Cloud banks in a merciless deluge, 2015. — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Cloud banks in a merciless deluge* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 110 cm]

Pamela Golden - The first sign of a critical transition, 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *The first sign of a critical transition.* [Sumi, watercolour and ink on Hahnemuhle paper, 110 x 150 cm]

Pamela Golden - Johnson, Surfboard 2015 — © Pamela Golden (2015) *Johnson* [UV Print on found body board, 29 x 119 x 1cm]

Charlie Don’t Surf Catalogue

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“There are two sources for Golden’s large watercolour-and-ink works: schlocky sci-fi illustrations of prehistoric worlds and photographs of off-duty American soldiers surfing during the Vietnam War.

The resulting mashups, featuring longboarders frolicking in lagoons also hosting dinosaurs, are strangely, powerfully evocative. With their bleached or saturated colours, and their gauzy, almost filmic quality, they suggest a kind of dreamlike yearning for lost innocence, a fantasy of prelapsarian grace.”

- Gabriel Coxhead, Blouin Modern Painters (March 2016).