After Us, the Flood

An extraordinary afternoon was recently shared by the GAG Group at Gato Gallery, where members gathered to hear artist David Charlie speak about his compelling new solo exhibition, After Us, the Flood.

The exhibition sees Charlie re-engage with a photographic archive spanning more than two decades, much of it emerging from a formative period spent living and working on a farm in regional Western Australia. Removed from the metropolis and its often apotheosised cultural identity, Charlie and his contemporaries constructed their own imagined worlds - hedonistic fantasies performed in an unmistakably antipodean distortion.

What makes After Us, the Flood particularly affecting is the way the archive is treated not as fixed historical document, but as something living and unstable. Through painterly re-touching and layered intervention, Charlie unsettles chronology itself. Images become sites of return and revision, where figures appear to encounter themselves across time - naked bodies meeting their own histories in compositions suspended between memory, desire, performance, and decay.

Hearing David speak so candidly about the evolution of the work added a deeply personal dimension to the exhibition. His reflections on distance, friendship, artistic survival, and the fluidity of memory revealed the emotional architecture beneath the images. There was a rare generosity in the conversation — one that transformed the afternoon into something far more intimate than a traditional gallery talk.