$10 Grub, Jewel of the Newell 2010

Summary

Melbourne-based artist Tully Moore has a keen fascination with the social and cultural landscapes on which contemporary urban life is built. With a practice encompassing painting, assemblage, video and installation, his works have been described as creating a 'kind of incidental map' of the terrain he navigates. Often, his works will incorporate the ideas, objects, narratives and signage that Moore encounters during his daily peregrinations.

Take '$10 Grub', for example, which came into the Art and Heritage Collection in 2013. Gesturing to a subtextual narrative regarding place and class, this painting of an uncomplicated sign advertising a humble meal of meat and three veg points to suburbia, nostalgia and a certain lack of sophistication. But this depiction of suburban lifestyle is not any sort of smug class-bashing; rather, in today's era of high-ticket, urbane dining and evermore-perplexing 'gourmania', the down-home square meal and the cafe that serves it are invoked as an honest deal.