Walking out of the Ararat regional gallery you see a pub, a drive through bottle-shop, council buildings. There is nothing remarkable about the view, it is a scene found in almost every rural town. However, with a mind full of the quiet visual encounters just experienced within the confines of the gallery, the mundane streetscape is an affront to the senses.

The sound of truck airbrakes as they halt at town’s few traffic lights and the smell of diesel are hard to reconcile with the moments spent in conversation with art.

Geoff Newton has placed a frame around these scenes, tenderly painted them and now shows them in his exhibition The Victorian Scene at the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre. You come into the gallery to see what you may have ignored outside. Newton encourages engagement with our world, not an escape from it.