Exhibitions

Fresh Cut is our annual emerging-artists exhibition with works selected from the graduating student exhibitions at Queensland art schools. The 2006 exhibition, curated by Vanessa McRae, features Sylvie Bruce, Nathan Corum, Monique Cronje, Marcella Cullen, David Jones, Kate Kirby, Kathryn McSherry, Virginia Miller, Velvet Pesu, Marius Saetersdal, and Genevieve Staines. Nathan Corum photographs Hitchcock films through his 'corumscope', made from cardboard tubes. This budget device creates stylish high-tech images, recalling 1960s moderne decor. [image: Nathan Corum]

Brisbane's Tracey Moffatt is arguably Australia’s most internationally successful contemporary artist. Her photo-narratives take the form of films and photo-sequences. Her photo-sequence Adventure Series—inspired by Flying Doctor comics and the TV series The Rovers—satirises and celebrates the retro-cheesey 'adventure' genre. While Adventure Series suggests a story, it is little more than a collection of familiar tropes. A hunky pilot, a glamorous blonde and a sinister scuba diver join Moffatt in this outback fantasy, replete with Aboriginal encounters and foul play, all staged in front of scrupulously fake painted sets. Alongside Moffatt presents her playful video Love—a collaboration with Gary Hillberg. This montage of hundreds of cliche-sodden clips from well-known Hollywood films charts how love can quickly dissolve eventually leading to cathartic violence. Adventure Series was produced during an IMA residency.

Catalogue Essay

Chinese video artist Zhang Peili subverts images of authority. Actor’s Line uses footage from the 1964 movie Sentry Under Neon Lights, where two men meet on a bridge to discuss political ideology. Reedited by Peili, their body language and proximity suggest a relationship that is 'more than ideological'. In Last Words, a dying hero’s final moments are repeated to emphasise the artificiality of death in a romantic revolutionary style. Peili’s residency was supported by the Australia-China Council.

Catalogue Essay

In Shaun Gladwell's videos extreme sporting activities of urban youth are configured in spaces of iconic architectural and/or natural significance. Skateboarders, capoiera dancers, and BMX bikers do their thing in scenes that ultimately shape and influence the nature of their performances physically and semiologically, just as their activities rewrite their surrounds.

Catalogue Essay

Three Colours juxtaposes artists from either side of the Tasman who focus on the representation of indigenous identity and respond to the politics of our changing culturescape.

Brisbane painter Gordon Bennett's polemical work developed out of 1980s appropriation art and is concerned with mapping alternative histories for post-colonial Australia. In 1995, as an act of personal liberation from preconceptions about his indigenous heritage, he created a pop-art-inspired persona, John Citizen, 'an abstraction of the Australian Mr Average, the Australian Everyman'. 


New Zealand's Peter Robinson—a 3.125% Maori—came to attention for his work satirising the marketability of Maori art. His venal, vernacular works countered the prevailing cliches of Maori as aristocratic and deeply spiritual. The show includes his Strategic Plan (a laughable mind-map for achieving success in the international art world) and works from The Divine Comedy, his 2001 Venice Biennale project, concerned with nihilism and the depiction of 'nothing'.

Three Colours exploits uncanny correspondences between the two artists, for instance the way they both draw extensively on the work of African-American 1980s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat. The title refers to the three-coloured Aboriginal and Maori flags. Three Colours was curated by Zara Stanhope and toured by the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne. [image: Gordon Bennett]

Catalogue Essay

In his book Relational Aesthetics, Nicholas Bourriaud argues that a new generation of artists have dispensed with old approaches to art. Instead, contemporary artists like Pierre Huyghe, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija make works that privilege 'relations' over 'objects'. In so doing, they develop a more engaged relationship with the art audience and the broader community. Mark Pennings, Andrew McNamara, David Cross, Toni Ross, Bronia Ivanbrook, David Broker, and Rex Butler debate Nicholas Bourriaud’s fashionable theory. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries Faculty. [image: Nicholas Bourriaud]

 

 

The Campfire Group was born out of 1980s Brisbane, amidst cheap studio spaces, the Fitzgerald Enquiry, moods of excitement, bravery and change. It began with an agenda of creating black and white dialogue.

A key figure in the Group and the curator of Shoosh!, Michael Eather, explains: 'It is neither a whitefella’s story nor a blackfella’s story alone. From my own (white) perspective, I observed at the time that there were many others who didn’t know who, what, where, when or how to talk about notions of Aboriginality and its varied forms of art. I was surprised that there were so many whitefellas who didn’t actually know any blackfellas, let alone confide in them. The media was customarily patronising about "black issues", popular arts magazines and writers were often too remote or conceptual for any meaningful dialogue, and the greenies were too soft. Still, musicians, performers, writers and artists were carving new ground in this "pre-bicentennial" climate and black artists understood the timing of this better than most.'

Shoosh! includes work by Michael Eather, Michael Nelson Jagamara, Imants Tillers, Vincent Serico, Herb Wharton, Richard Bell, Marshall Bell, Joanne Currie, Tiriki Onus, Walala Tjapaltjarri, Laurie Nilsen, Bianca Beetson and Leigh Hobba. In collaboration with Fire-Works, Brisbane. [image: Mick Richards]

Catalogue Essay

Artist Judy Watson and composer Liza Lim map Queensland's Glass House Mountains in an installation-performance work. It comprises topographical contour maps painted in ochres, environmental sound and video recordings, spatially manipulated electronics, live cello performances, and a transposed pineapple patch. These varieties of representation become a landscape in their own right. In collaboration with Elision, for Queensland Music Festival.

Catalogue Essay

Sound and art works that concentrate on the evening as a transitional time bordering day and night, a zone when new sounds begin to emerge and natural forms crossover. In collaboration with Elision for Queensland Music Festival.

Catalogue Essay

Dusseldorf artist Mischa Kuball explores urban structures, the fabrics of buildings and cities. His works often use projected light. In one installation he slide-projects views of Brisbane and Dusseldorf onto paper lampshades within which strobe lights disruptively flash. In City through Glass he films a trip through Brisbane through the bottom of a drinking glass, then projects the results twice, side by side, creating a doubled, drunk, binocular view of the city. Show in a gallery with windows onto the street, the projection is barely visible by day; at night it is spectacular.

Catalogue Essay

Monika Tichacek's Matthew-Barneyesque video The Shadowers became a cause celebre when it was removed to an R-rated backroom on its debut at Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It presents a chain of surreal sado-masochistic interactions among a trio of female characters, one played by the artist herself. The costumed violence extends to cannibalism; a face and shoulder are apparently gnawed away; one woman is seen in the act of devouring, like a proud lioness hovering lustily over her prey; mouths are bruised and garnished with thorns; the artist sews her thighs together using a needle and thread, creating a cat's cradle. Tichacek sets her dark-side psychodrama in nature, as if to suggest her characters' perversities are somehow pre-civil. It's hard to unpick The Shadowers. While packed with extreme acts, their motivation seems uncertain. Does the piece simply rehearse narcissistic sado-masochistic pleasures or reach toward some greater allegory? Your call.

Catalogue Essay

For Crop, the latest installment in his sculptural self-portrait project, Brisbane's Charles Robb strands three life-size self-portraits—aping 'cropped' portrait busts or fragments of classical sculpture—across the floor of our biggest gallery. This beautifully judged work mixes vast space and intense detail, visceral realism and the frigid materiality of marble. Using academic realism to paradoxically expressive effect, Crop combines the ideas of a deposed classical artistic tradition (the busts look like they have been knocked off their pedestals) and the-death-of-the-author (one mouth is stuffed, as if by a mortician or chef), yet exceeds both.

Catalogue Essay

Incorporating text-paintings, performances-for-video and real food, Brisbane's Franz Ehmann’s show addresses the idea of the last meal, in existential, ontological, and practical terms. Meals replicate those given to prisoners on death row. There are also 'monster foods', used for torture (baklava was used by interrogators). A bowl of figs refers to Cleopatra’s last meal—she may have committed suicide. The foods, some of which are encased in black beeswax, rot or dry during the show.

Edward Colless explains: 'The chef is enacting the last wishes of a person now dead: someone who cannot eat what is offered, and thus the meal is wasted. It will sit there for the duration of the exhibition and rot, like food left in a temple for a god to eat or flowers left at a grave … the offering is a sacrifice, not an analytical concept. It will be consumed by time in the absence of the god.'

Catalogue Essay

Brisbane's Natalie Billing reproduces 200 images from old photo-albums on porcelain slivers, and suspends them from the ceiling on ribbons. Divorced from the context of personal memory, the snaps become generic, aesthetic. Scissors sitting on a pedestal suggest that the ties could be cut and the images repossessed or smashed.

Brisbane's Sharon Green juxtaposes photographs of dead animals with photographs of glamorous wounded women. Promoting trophy hunting as a predominantly male preoccupation and drawing a parallel between blood sports and courtship, these lush commercial-looking images epitomise an ambivalent feminism.

Brisbane's Gia Mitchell recreates the ceremonial site and paraphernalia of a fantasised coven in remote Western Queensland. The gallery space becomes the centre of a sacred compass circle of scorched earth. Images of women loom over the cardinal points: North, South, East, and West. A fan made from crow feathers, the burnt remnants of a crude musical instrument, an embroidered likeness of a noxious Madagascan weed, and the skin of a blue heeler—objects employed in The Way—are displayed with a nonchalance that contradicts their symbolic potency.

Rev-heads have great set pieces to show off the power of their machines and their driving prowess. They do burnouts, doughnuts and hand-breakies causing their tyres to vaporise in clouds of smoke to the rapturous applause of their peers. These days police will confiscate cars if they catch their drivers attempting such stunts. However every year Canberra enjoys Summernats, a pageant for hot-rods, street machines and ‘sleepers’, where this activity is legitimised and commodified as a spectacle. Melbourne artist Ben Morieson’s video Burnout 2004 – Overhead combines such events and fine art. A car performs choreographed manoeuvres under instructions from the artist for an enthusiastic audience. It is filmed from on high, from a camera suspended from a cherrypicker. From this godly vantage point we can appreciate burnouts and doughnuts as a spectacular kind of drawing.

'The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it – it's as immediate and as superficial as that.'—Matthew Collings

With Artworkers, we bring bratty British art critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings to the ARC Biennale to lecture on his work. The former Artscribe editor writes in an unpretentious chatty way, and is a master of sound-bite art criticism. Collings is well known for his TV series This is Modern Art, where he honed his image as a sceptical art-world insider, and as the presenter of Channel Four's coverage of the Turner Prize. He has just made a new TV documentary series, Matt’s Old Masters. He writes regularly for Modern Painters.

Maori/Samoan artist Lonnie Hutchinson transforms the gallery into a chapel with a shrine to Elvis (the Elvesi claimed as Polynesia's own) and a series of signature black cut-out paper veils representing the Stations of the Cross. However it is the inky eroticism of her nude studies—evoking the bloodstained histories of sexual slavery in the Pacific—that steal the show.

In his show He Aha Te Mea Nui/What Is The Greatest Thing? Maori artist Reuben Peterson rewrites Maoritanga through bling. He uses shimmer disks to picture a postcard beach scene, animating it with an artificial zephyr provided by an electric fan; and creates an 'island' of accumulated glitter encrusted shoes.

Samuel Tupou makes decorative graphic works, screenprinted on perspex. Conflating images from his Tongan cultural inheritance with imagery from pop art and popular culture, they are equal parts tapa and Warhol. The work pays tribute to Island values as it evacuates them. Tupou is based in Cairns, where he runs a T-shirt printing business.