Lane Cormick
(b. 1975, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Lane Cormick works across a range of media and draws from a wide spectrum of influences. From industrial and functional aesthetics to investigations of skill, technique, performance, music, and modernist and contemporary culture, his practice is intentionally open-ended and unpredictable in outcome. Several of Cormick’s works are the result of endurance-based performance or procedure, with the artist often opting for impractical projects that test his physical and mental capabilities and, as a result, expose his limits.

For Melbourne Now, Cormick presents two double portraits, Bushwicj, 2020–23, and Sampras, 2020–23. Each begins with the artist scattering a collection of chads (the paper circle created when using a holepunch) onto the first portrait and then painstakingly copying the pattern of the way the chads have fallen onto a second portrait. The works speak to the artist’s interest in forging connections between 1990s fandom and art history, and more specifically to the Dadaist commitment to chance and accidental composition. Combined with references to the inherent obsessiveness and rhythm of both hip-hop lyrics and the bounce of a tennis ball, each portrait also conceals a third portrait, where Cormick has used backing paper with an image from 90s magazine The Source on the reverse.

Cormick completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1999. Since then, he has exhibited extensively across Melbourne and Sydney, including solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, Sutton Gallery, Bus Projects, Chapter House Lane, Melbourne Art Fair, Neon Parc, Gertrude Contemporary, Art Forum Berlin, Hell Gallery, TCB, Connors Connors and Ocular Lab. He has also shown in group settings at the NGV, Gertrude Glasshouse, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Spring 1883 Art Fair, Bus Projects, Counihan Gallery and more. He has also been the recipient of an Australia Council residency in Los Angeles and a Gertrude Contemporary residency in Melbourne.