Surrounded by the moving waves of a not-so-distant past, their brushed drapery is rearranged in the dusty soil of this South. With a captive eye only the sound of art can perceive, a fresh scent is awakened, an endless story is revealed.
The idea for The Book of Fabulas and Scented Echoes was born in 2020, during lock down. Being at home, inspired Drasko to open forgotten art books and play with the concept of having a museum in your own backyard. Drasko has experimented with 3-D art for over a decade, and he developed the concept of 3-D cut outs, or ‘analogue augmented reality’, by which he holds a cut out of characters from, mostly, European famous paintings and juxtapose them with a background of daily life in Australia, in photographic work. This contrast makes reference to colonial narratives and puts forward the need to bring stories of yesteryear to life with a new lens; in the land that is our home.
In addition to the images, Drasko has collaborated with partner in life, the literary translator (English into Spanish) and emerging artist Eleonor Palacio, who added another layer to the atmosphere of the works by writing accompanying poetic descriptions inspired by the visuals, to create a single voice. As Dr Bernhard Sachs has described it, the series presented in this show ‘draws from a persistent and lively thematic threaded throughout [Drasko’s] practice, a rich Balkan folkloric imaging tradition, its contemporary analogue in popular culture and its humorous, affectionate and ironic perspective on so-called high art. The meeting of this with the intense literary tradition of its South American corollary in Melbourne proposes a sophisticated larrikin poetic’.