AUSTRALIAN ART COLLECTOR
ISSUE 56, 2011

BY ASHLEY CRAWFORD

Catastrophe comes in many forms and Becc Ország seems intent to capture it all in unsparing detail. Specialising in drawing - a form that seems to be increasingly acknowledged among collectors - Ország's work ranges from the remarkably meticulous to the errily obscured. It also ranged from the mayhem of nature - the black billowing clouds of a volcano - to hints of Orwellian oppression.

And the results are gaining enthusiastic followers. Last year, while still a Bachelor of Arts Student, she won a $2000 undergraduate scholarship to spend on travel and she was also awarded the $1000 Siemens-RMIT Acquisition Prize, becoming part of the Siemens corporate collection.

Ország's drawings, for all of its beautifully rendered linework, has a distinctly millennial sensibilty, as though apocalypse, whether on a personal or global scale, is just around the corner. "It is the potential for upheavel or, worse, nothingness that we constantly seem to be on the edge of,: she says of her subject matter. "But it's all unseen, unspoken of, like we are unaware of just how close to that line we are. Too caught up in just existing that we forget to question and instead just do." The figures in her drawings seem unknowingly contained, bound, hindered and oblivious of their fate. "It's the ingnorance and conplacency to this constraint which I think disturbs me most," she says. "This is what I'm prodding at. Particularily when it oves beyond compliancy to ecstacy without knowing why or how you got there. The protagonists are completely unaware, like marionettes, they are oblivious to their surroundings and actions."

For a long time realism had been frowned upon in lieu of the conceptual or abstract. Suddenly it has returned with a cengeance with such artists as Daniel Price, Sam Leach and Jackson Slattery. "I think realism can appeal on multiple levels," says Ország. "For the viewer wishing for immeadiate satisfaction, visually, realism is readily accessible and viscerally familiar, which has also been its let-down. It becomes too accessible and easy. But then often what is being depicted isn't reality. It allows you to create a false sense of security. If you care to look beyond the surface of the real...alternate realities begin to reveal themselves. I think the potential of manipulating percieved reality is incredibly tempting for artists; realism is like bait, it tricks people in."