Where cities evolve and grow according to their needs over many years, the history of the place is written in their architecture. We expect to find this in European cities where Gothic cathedrals stand cheek by jowl with modern shopping districts or in Chicago, a city where Frank Lloyd Wright's horizontal Robie House shares accolades with the vertically unchallenged Sears Tower. Even Melbourne places a totally modern museum next door to a very Victorian (in the Royal sense) building.

If architecture tells a city's story, then ours is but a paragraph as new constructions supersede the old. Doney looks at the local cityscape and finding scant history, addresses how buildings shape our present and might project the future. His reference to familiar buildings, painted in precise black line over multicoloured grounds, create an unsettling, surreal effect..

Large paintings and collections of smaller screen prints describe an architecture that restricts humanity and modifies behaviour. For example City Station captures the noise and bustle of urbanites going about their business. The ground is composed of coloured angular shapes, each an entity in itself yet locked neatly into the whole to create a jagged pattern. Bold black lines are painted over this plethora of colour and shapes, confining all sense of movement within sets of parallel lines. The movement of humanity and machines are directed through time and space by the design of the architecture.

The series City Structure is devoid of any sense of life giving it a post apocalyptic feel. Each exhibit has a familiar building drawn in black over a different coloured ground. The orange of #8 and  mottled hues in #3 suggests some kind of noxious event has destroyed the population while leaving its structures intact. And the cool blues of #4 and #6 show us a Perth after global warming has allowed the ocean into the city to wash away the people but not the steel skeletons of their habitats. We wonder what the apes, or dolphins, of the next millennium will make of these hollow phallic structures.

Doney's work is well conceived and presented. By reducing local architecture into geometric patterns and presenting them in unique perspective he creates a formal interest. However the use of acidic colours underlying this black (or white in the screen prints) reference to reality opens the door to eerie interpretations. As a third year art student, it will be interesting to see where he goes with this in future.