The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future

It was a joy to escape the summer heat and dry plains of Bathurst and dive into the world of the future, or at least what was promised. Adam Norton’s survey exhibition at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 'The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future' is a captivating display of paintings, video, works on paper and sculpture, culminating in a fantastical exploration of the space race, alien sightings and nuclear testing. Here we are immersed into a world of speculative fiction, and a time where seemingly surreal political forces such as the Cold War could morph into the Space Race and onto Mars – the wild, wild west – where no man or politician had gone before.

Norton’s 20-year survey is comprehensive and greatly defined by the artist’s upbringing – born in the 1950s and growing up during the political and social upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s. The Cold War and imminent threat of nuclear war permeated the press and popular culture. In these larger-than-life experiences it is unsurprising that the artist was drawn to the bright signs, posters and shiny promise of reaching the moon and outer space for the sake of mankind. The forward-looking vision and push for something more outside of the turmoil of earth has hardly been matched by today’s politics.

Across the exhibition we encounter Norton’s ability to mirror and appropriate posters, signs and objects and reimagine them into a slightly larger than life interpretation. The trick of tromp l’oeil painting is well practiced in his large-scale giant badges, sculptures or painting of a signed NASA Food Tray, 2019. We can follow a narrative of hand painted movie posters and admire astronauts on monumental memorabilia. The subversion of scale where small badges are larger than life, and movie posters are sized down and softly hand painted, instils a sense of play and delight. Norton’s depiction of the movie posters, graphics and sci-fi imagery celebrate the role of speculative fiction, in which we are presented with alternate futures and asked to consider ourselves and society within them.

The exhibition divides Norton’s various fascinations including from “Dreams of Space” to “UFOology”. And the imagined worlds of science fiction and alien sightings are mirrored by the surreal forces of nuclear testing, which played out in the deserts of the US and Australia. Here boundaries of real and imagined are blurred. Norton embraces psychogeography in which the artist has a strong interest in the events that have shaped a site. Delving into the landscapes of nuclear testing, “the Badlands”, Norton collages memorabilia and divides imagery into large scale triptychs. The grouping of imagery illuminates the multilayered acts that have transformed these places. And his inclusion of life-size sculptures of government signs replicated from these sites are eerie observations of the unseen impacts that are left behind.

In The Signs are Good Norton balances a wry sense of humour and delight with an earnest inquiry into a wild period defined by the nuclear phenomenon that made the world hold its breath. Across the comprehensive survey, Norton’s play and subversion of signs, narratives and symbols, asks us to question the paradigms and political messaging at play today. By looking to the past – or in his case painting the future – he pulls us into a back and forth about how our lives are shaped by the social and political forces of our time.

Exhibition
The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future
Until 2 February 2025
Bathurst Regional Gallery

Images courtesy of the artist, Bathurst Regional Gallery and Silversalt Photography.