RMIT School of Art is thrilled to see so many staff, students and alumni featured in the NGV exhibition Melbourne Now.

Today we feature sessional lecturer Adam Lee.

Alumnus and sessional lecturer Adam Lee’s painting and drawing practice ties together narratives of memory, imagination and transcendence. With a personal outlook informed by a wide range of sources — from folklore, legend and biblical narratives to natural history, music, film and literature — his works on canvas and paper build elaborate worlds where allegory and atmosphere converge.

For Melbourne Now, Lee presents seven watercolour works that emerged from the artist’s experiences during Victoria’s lockdowns. In Mr Jabs, 2022, the familiar sight of a bandaged arm recalls the vaccination drives of the past few years, while Final days, 2022, references the beak-like ‘plague doctor’ garb of the late Renaissance period, immortalised as a commedia dell’arte character. Other works are more personal in nature, drawing on objects connected to the artist’s family (A Covering, 2022) or a photograph taken in Japan and gifted by a fellow artist (Message (After HBS), 2022). Though diverse in subject matter, source material and degrees of abstraction, collectively the works form not only a snapshot of a moment in time, but also a series of alternate temporal and supernatural worlds that continue the artist’s ongoing interrogation of perception and experience.

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