Exhibitions
Fresh Cut 2006
Vanessa McRae and David Broker
Fresh Cut is the IMA's annual exhibition of emerging artists and 2006 is its tenth consecutive year. The works have been selected from 2005 graduating student exhibitions at Queensland College of Art at Griffith University, the Creative Industries Faculty of Queensland University of Technology and the University of South East Queensland. All the artists have drawn on familiar and personal experiences. Domestic situations and objects play an overwhelming role.
Kirra Jamison's work stems from her research into Islamic and Arabesque designs, that were originally inspired by repetitive patterns in nature. Her installation finds vintage plates and kitsch ornaments displayed on a wall painting suggesting a sinuous vein system, relating these treasures – a morphological family tree. She explains, 'by presenting these objects in such a manner, I have removed their functionality. What remains is their history, a connection with a previous owner, origin or use.'
A die-hard pop-culture junkie, Daniel McKewen has a love/hate relationship with celebrities as the idealised demi-gods of contemporary culture. Appropriating images from movies, magazines and advertising, his work probes his personal obsession with celebrity as well as that of society at large. Using the conventions of now forbidden cigarette advertising, he nudges our desires and prods our complacent consumerist attitudes. McKewen often adds nagging advertising-style copy lines. Writing 'he knows her' alongside a cliched image of a beautiful woman, he highlights the ludicrous voyeuristic foundation of the celebrity system, as if to say: He thinks he knows her, in reality he never will.
Jennifer Lowrey's large loose paintings of rabbits draw inspiration from illustrated children's books. Her interests are partly formal, partly iconographic. Iconographically, the anthropomorphicing of animals has long been a means to explore alternative narratives and philosophies – nothing being impossible for a rabbit wearing plaid. Lowrey suggests that the magical world of children's books, inhabited by carefree bunnies, is a utopian ideal that we have lost. Her work is 'an attempt to return to the basic premise of wonder.'
Paper Roses, Davina Kelly's series of embossed lino prints, takes its name from the classic country and western song about 'imitation love'. The song was popular with Indigenous women in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great social change, when political rights were finally granted to Indigenous people. One of the 'civilised vices' of the new freedom was entry to pubs, which enabled Indigenous women to establish new forms of social interaction, such as catching up with lost family and friends and having 'love affairs' with white men. 'Imitation love' became a means of survival for many Indigenous women, and a new form of subjugation. Kelly's disquieting paintings and prints are a stark portrayal of an aspect of recent Australian history many people find unpalatable and a potent reminder of the continuing 'white assumption of consent' on levels personal and political.
Kirsty Bruce's technically refined pencil and watercolour images blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. Her works meticulously reproduce pictures drawn from teen magazines. What is immediately striking about Bruce's studies is their meditative quality; they demand considerable concentration from artist and viewer alike. Bruce installs her pictures en masse, like favourite images collected on the walls of a teenager's bedroom. She can take days to produce the 'right' wall. 'Blu-Tack is my friend', she notes. While her passion for patient ordering is evident, Bruce's installations seem provisional, still growing. 'There is gradual unfolding,' she says, 'each wave or footstep repeats the previous one, yet each is unique and distinct, evolving from one painting to the next.'
Florence Tetuira describes herself as an assimilated Aboriginal woman within white society, a product of the Stolen Generation. She lives in a modern urban environment, but her traditional country is her mother's, Kuku and Yalanji, from the lower part of Cape York, Queensland. Tetuira has undertaken research into traditional dilly bags, which provide a bridge back into her community and family history. The threads in the dilly bag are a metaphor for Aboriginal culture. Its materials, simplicity of design, strength and durability stand for the building blocks of kinship, death and rebirth encompassed by totemic system thousands of years old. Tetuira's detailed prints of dilly bags represent a way of overcoming loss and reconciling with her people.
Ritchie Ares Dona makes sculptures out of books – including discount catalogues and paperback novels – by routinely folding their pages with mathematical precision. His procedure transforms the books, changing their shapes. The symmetries and harmonies of the resulting forms evoke those of classical architecture. Like devotional objects found in cathedrals or temples, these labour intensive works invite meditation.
Emma McLean's work focuses on the abject qualities of being an Australian female and is aimed at exposing the very normal actions that are seen to be intrinsically embedded in a woman's role. Her performance-for-video is a personal response to the way popular culture's ideals have been infused into the female psyche. Her character – Princess 100% Australian Sausage (aka Sausdog) – engages with kilos of sausage meat to expose the monstrous ugliness underpinning the business of being beautiful (advertising, fashion, plastic surgery and vivisection). Her physiologically shocking video is designed to jolt her audience out of apathy.
The protagonist of the film Groundhog Day is doomed to endlessly relive the same day. Similarly Paul Mumme's videos have no beginning and no end. His witty, absurd vignettes – such as standing in a pool in the rain with an umbrella hint at greater significances. He says, 'My works are concerned with contradiction, repetition and significance within insignificance, combined with socio-political statements about our cyclical thought and behavioral patterns. One moment, arbitrary in length and content is treated as infinite and ever present, as though it is trapped in space and time, forever progressing and regressing.'
Inspired by books like American Psycho, Christian Flynn's analysis of social ills has given him an air of active critical despondency. In attacking and wounding commonplace domestic objects – such as pictures, toys and advertising signage – he seeks to expose 'scars of the domestic', and highlight the greed, self-glorification and violence endemic in everyday life. The words in his aluminium text work – GRIEF, FEAR and HURT – might reveal profound frustration and pessimism, but Flynn sees his work as the beginning of healing.
Chef Andrew Rewald uses the tools of his trade. He creates representations of the 'great white hunter' using objects from the kitchen, a traditionally female-gendered domestic space. Lemon squeezers, plastic cocktail forks and jelly moulds are mounted on 'home sweet home' plaques, giving them the appearance of hunting trophies. In contrast to the traditional prize – the head of the beast – these trophies have the translucent corporeal appearance of human organ. The automatic washing machine has long been an icon of utopian labour-saving modernity.
Sculptor Peter Booth takes liberties with washing machines, perhaps to address technology's overall failure to generate a contented society. His 'assisted readymades' defamiliarise the ubiquitous appliance. By giving it a slice, a stretch or an addition, he creates absurd mutant versions. Booth adds, 'conceived as a labour saving tool, the washing machine now represents the short term throwaway good, polluting just as it cleans.'
Gail Cowley's childhood experiences in state institutions and her later work with prison inmates has been profoundly scarring. She paints quasi-naive portraits of prison and hospital inmates on old institutional enamelware cups, plates and bowls. Her serial-numbered portraits address the loss of identity experienced by those incarcerated or in care. Despite the lack of detail – particularly the regular absence of eyes – Cowley imbues each portrait with character by focusing on details such as hair, skin colour and accessories, perhaps restoring a sense of identity where it had been lost. Her art works through issues of marginalisation towards redemption. She comments, 'I remain committed to the value of art as a means of promoting the value of individuality and cultural diversity.' [image: Emma McLean]