Groupthink

Greg Cliffe

The exhibition “Groupthink” will examine the nature of group behaviour across a range of sub-cultures and social environments. The paintings on canvas and paper will focus on sporting, business, recreational and leisure milieus which appear mundane and benign, but reveal recent change in cultural and social values, family behaviour and human relationships. I have always been interested in how social values and cultural history can be transmitted by folk narrative, fables and yarns and what these say about group cohesion, conformity and shared presumptions. I like to collect a range of humorous stories, anecdotes on which to base subjects for my current narrative paintings. My early career performance-art and recent amateur stage design has also helped me to present theatrical painting interpretations of social events through fictional characters and narratives. They form contemporary fables much as the “interesting eccentrics” that populated my father’s “yarns” in my childhood. In one way I have continued the “yarn-spinning” through fictional narratives based on family research and the restructuring of historical social events.The use of fictional characterizations based on factual interpretations provided an opportunity to address social conditions in much the same way as modern film making. I hope to stimulate the audience’s curiosity to question what is actually occurring in my paintings. They are purposely ambiguous eliciting a variety of interpretations and judgements from the viewer. The viewer is led to analyze the motives of the characters in the narrative and often suspect their behavior particularly in a group dynamic, hence my present focus on the phenomena of Groupthink.