We are delighted to welcome  ‘AGWA Collection Part: 2’ featured West Australian artist Tom Freeman. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, video and installation. His deliberately lo-fi practice combines home-craft and DIY tropes and techniques with modern and post-modern visual/narrative languages. These are employed to map the parameters of his real and imaginary lives. His redoubling of the everyday with this, has a particularly thoughtful charm and a quietly confident deliberateness that demonstrates the necessity of personal investment in the local as a platform for larger political engagement and considerations about the functioning of the world.

Freeman is represented in the State Art Collection by paintings and videos works. They form a
vital – yet, to a large degree, overlooked – aspect of his practice and perfectly reflect the most
important characteristics of his work to date. Breakfast Club Redone 2006 is a hilarious shot-by-
shot remake of a section of the original film, with locals including the artist himself taking on the
roles of the actors. It charts the stupidity of taking American models as our own, whilst showing
that they are in some senses, and at some times, inescapable. Beyond this, it also functions as a marginal critique of the mainstream, parodying its self-involved characters and repatching the original as an absurdist piece of near surrealism in the process. The work also references bootlegging cultures and other kinds of covers and re-enactments such as the famous instance of Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Adaptation 1989 made over seven years by a group of children who began the project when they were 12. Equally, it frames its location within the history of video art as it emerged out of DIY cinema culture.

In an oddly similar manner, I’ve Cum to the Clean the Pool is an utterly brilliant suburban vignette, drawing on 1980’s cinema tropes as well as parallel porn narratives; yet nothing happens. Of course, the ‘nothing’ is the point; the build-
up, the beer between the two young men at the end, the moments of awkwardness they share is all there is.

As indicated, each of the works is charming whilst also being awkwardly smart, expressing an intelligent humility that will no doubt make them classics of WA video art. It would be hoped that having them in our Collection will bring them into wider renown nationally and beyond.