Peter Westwood: 'Staring Back at the World' (2013)
Staring Back at the World was staged at Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2013. The spaces depicted in this group of Peter Westwood's works are familiar to us, and yet his treatment reveals them to be deeply mysterious, and perhaps ultimately unknowable. These yards, supermarkets, docking-bays, waiting rooms, lots, terminals, hospitals, foyers, and lobbies are the spaces in which we spend a good proportion of our lives, passing through, or marking time on our way to the next ports of call. And yet we barely register them as we drift through, always seemingly on our way to somewhere else. Their omnipresence renders them invisible. Do we ever pause to consider what effect these efficient - and efficiently blank - spaces have on us? How are we shaped by these vast, ‘unnoticed’ structures that play so large a role in our lives? Westwood has written in relation to this exhibition that: “We stare at the world and the world looks back… we exist within passivity, a state formed through