http://www.ima.org.auEN http://www.ima.org.au katrina@ima.org.au katrina@ima.org.au Institute of Modern Art Website Baker Content Management System This year's Queensland emerging-artists show features work by Sally Golding, Kelly Hussey-Smith, Fiona Mail, and Elizabeth Willing. Each receives $5,000 from Brisbane Airport to support making work for the show. Sally Golding works in 'expanded cinema', combining film projection with performance and installation elements. She is currently completing a Masters at the Queensland College of Art. Recently, she has developed performance works where she projects films directly onto her body, creating live cine-sculptures and interactions. She works solo and with Joel Stern as Abject Leader. As a member of the OtherFilm collective, she has been involved in curating innovative moving-image and performance events and exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. For Fresh Cut, she will be creating an installation using a 16mm film loop, a two-way mirror, strobe lighting, and the viewer's own body. Kelly Hussey-Smith studied photojournalism at Queensland College of Art, graduating with first-class honours last year. She comes out of an activist-photography tradition. Over the last few years she has collaborated with NGOs such as Operation Smile, who provide free surgery to children born with cleft lips and palates in developing countries. She was editor of The Australian PhotoJournalist in 2007-8. Caged, her new series of photographs and videos, considers the tragic living conditions of animals in zoos. With this work, she hopes to prompt a dialogue about our relationship with animals and question our use of animals as decoration and entertainment. Kate Woodcroft and Catherine Sagin studied together at Queensland University of Technology. In 2008 they started making collaborative works under the name Fiona Mail. These works explore the dynamics of collaboration through task-based activities that often border on parody. For Fresh Cut they are studying fencing in preparation for a duel on opening night. For the next year, their collaborative works will be exhibited under the name of the winner. Woodcroft and Sagin are also co-directors of the artist-run initiative No Frills*. Elizabeth Willing studied at Queensland University of Technology, completing a Honours degree in Fine Arts last year. Her works explore material and sensual aspects of food and food imagery. She is particularly drawn to sweets: she made wallpaper, retracing a William Morris pattern in lollies; she rendered gallery walls stucco-style in royal icing; she made a model of GoMA in marzipan; in a video, she licked her way through a pane of toffee. Willing is one of the directors of the art-run initiative Accidentally Annie St. Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2010 opens at the IMA on Saturday 7 August. Thanks again to Brisbane Airport for their visionary support of this project. [image: Fiona Mail] http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/brisbane-airport-fresh-cut-2010182.php?short=1 http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/brisbane-airport-fresh-cut-2010182.php?short=1 There's something rotton in the state of Ronnie. Melbourne artist Ronnie van Hout is a master of slapstick existentialism. His tragicomic works mash-up Sartre and Beckett with The Two Ronnies and The Nutty Professor. Often bearing his own features, van Hout's figurative sculptures beg to be read as doppelgangers, mini-mes, and selves from a parallel universe. In Sick Child 2 he presents himself child scale, in his PJs, one arm in a sling, the other hand down his pants—his adult face scowling. What would Hetty Johnson make of this image? Do we read it as an adult with childish features or as a child with adult features; as sick child or childish sicko? If this work is hideously abject, the iconic Failed Robot leans the other way. Apertures in its metallic-grey geometric-block body reveal fleshy human eyeballs and human-gums-and-teeth—vestiges of the organic. The frailty of the organic body is also a theme in Van Hout's cryptic installation Hold That Thought. In a clinical-white room, we find a desicated corpse in PJs scrunched up in a bathroom cupboard—like it died and dried there. Next to casts of six ripe potatoes are wrinkly casts of the same potatoes gone to seed. Alongside a molecule-like sculpture made of spheres is another of a picturesque male head breaking out in warts. In this contemporary vanitas, the viewer is left to join the dots. http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/ronnie-van-hout183.php?short=1 http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/ronnie-van-hout183.php?short=1 The ghost of the Emperor Haile Selassie meets Idi Amin, Charlie's Angels do Rambo Foxy-Brown-style, David Lynch's Lost Highway snakes through Lagos, Ghostface Killa mutates into Fela's 'Zombie', and Dracula gives way for Blacula. Voodoo, hoodoo, and mambo are mashed up with Igbo rituals. Ahhwooooo . . . Werewolves of Lagos. —Stacy Hardy They say Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the local home-video market up to a thousand titles a year. Such productivity is only possible because the movies are made in conditions that would make western filmmakers cringe. Produced and marketed in the space of a week, they use low-cost equipment, basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, and real locations. While drawing on genres and typologies drawn from Hollywood, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of mass-media self-representation. They stories—tales of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, prostitution—speak to the experiences and values of their audiences. The narrative is overdramatic, and deprived of happy endings. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted. Pieter Hugo became intrigued by Nollywood's fictional worlds where the everyday and the unreal intertwine. He asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets and photographed them. The resulting images recreate the stereotypical characters that typify Nollywood productions, including mummies, satanic demons, and zombies, all casually posed in the backlots of Enugu. Thanks to Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, and Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/nollywood184.php?short=1 http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/nollywood184.php?short=1 Brook Andrew is of Wiradjuri and Scottish descent. Although he is concerned not to be pigeonholed as an Aboriginal artist, his work nevertheless centres on Aboriginal politics. Conflating contraries, it confounds clear political readings. One of his most recent pieces—Jumping Castle War Memorial in the current Biennale of Sydney—is a generic war memorial in the form of an inflatable jumping castle decorated with a dazzling Wiradjuri/op-art motif. Jumping Castle War Memorial presents itself as an ethical connudrum. It sends out mixed messages: should we stand back and regard it respectfully, as a mechanism of mourning, or should we pounce upon it and have our fun? Is it about memory or amnesia? Andrew's follow-up work is even more oblique. The Cell is a twelve-by-six-metre inflatable room, decorated inside and out with Andrew's now trademark Wiradjuri/op-art pattern. Is this 'padded cell' punishment or playpen—for us or against us? To enter, one must first don paper overalls covered in the pattern. The overalls recall those worn by forensic technicians to avoid contaminating—and being contaminated by—crime scenes. In wearing them, are we donning 'the skin of the other', to merge with his environment and feel at one with him? Or, conversely, are the overalls camouflage or disguise, protecting us from our new environment, allowing us to lurk? Indeed, might they even be a form of masquerade—cultural drag? Andrew says, 'The original idea for The Cell is an extension of my wall pattern installations, where one is immersed in the pattern and experience. You are immediately transformed once you don a costume and enter. You become an inmate, a cellular astronaut, or asylum seeker.  Experiences of loss, asylum, and genocide are turned on their head. The Cell is a conundrum; a monument to such stories; a space for quiet contemplation, disorientation, and spectacle.' Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, with support from the IMA and Nelson Meers Foundation, The Cell debuted at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sydney (8 July—18 August 2010) before coming to Brisbane.   http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/the-cell187.php?short=1 http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/the-cell187.php?short=1 Christian Marclay has long criss-crossed the art and experimental-music scenes. Back in the 1970s, the Swiss artist pioneered the use of turntables and records as musical instruments, operating independently of but parallel to hip hop. He also developed a career in art, making works that play on music's materials, supplements, and representations. In his video, Looking for Love, he plays vintage records, skipping across them seeking the word 'love' in the lyrics, as if wanting to isolate the word from its context, constructing a new composition in the process. http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/looking-for-love189.php?short=1 http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/looking-for-love189.php?short=1