Get Along Gang

Description

"Get Along Gang’ is a collaborative mural by Melbourne artist David Booth (ghostpatrol) and a group of Year 8 students from Monterey Secondary College. Over multiple classroom sessions twelve students worked with Booth to develop the artwork, exploring mural planning, design and drawing techniques. The final artwork serves as a portrait and time capsule, with each bright, colourful character representing a student individually, sharing their personality, thoughts, feelings and interests at this time in their life. The process of creating this work was just as important as the outcome — discovering the fun and freedom that comes with working together to paint something bigger than themselves." Ghostpatrol, David Booth. 

Artist Bio
Born in Hobart, Tasmania. works and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Working under the pseudonym Ghostpatrol, David Booth first made a name for himself on the walls of Melbourne’s laneways. Working with ephemeral techniques, by 2007 Booth had built an international reputation and fanbase as a street artist. But Booth’s practice, grounded in a passion for drawing and sketching, has always been split between ephemeral works — street-based works, as well as temporary sculptural and installation works — and works on paper and linen. As a result, Booth sees his practice as floating between the worlds of fine art, commercial design, fan service, large mural painting and commercial collaboration.

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Booth now works and lives in Melbourne, Australia. The legacy of his childhood environment — Tasmania being an isolated and halcyon island, densely populated with forests and bodies of water — is threaded through Booth’s practice. His imaginary realms feel unearthly, meditative and ethereal; Booth is a creator not of simply works, but entire worlds. His works themselves feel like falling into a daydream; at once intensely familiar and welcoming, and entirely otherworldly. They are alternate realities.

Booth’s finely-drawn worlds are woven in threads of hybrid animals, creatures and characters, pop culture references and childhood nostalgia. Booth’s workspaces often turn, as he works, into small shrines; indulging and entering the realm he is conjuring. The whimsical and innocent qualities of his works ostensibly belie their conceptual concerns with metaphysics, cosmic scale, curiosity-led science, quantum physics and futurism. Booth’s iconic visual language invites us to see beyond the scale of our earthly existence and the limits of our own atomic configuration.

Booth’s ongoing explorations are focusing, at present, on ambitious installation and painting projects and other multimedia experiments, often working collaboratively. These passion projects — among them, the Hepburn Wind Farm and the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne — inform Booth’s studio practice and gallery work, and reflect the artist’s social and environmental conscience.