Exhibitions

Fresh Cut is our annual emerging artists exhibition with works selected from the graduating student exhibitions at Queensland art schools. The 2006 exhibition—the tenth Fresh Cut—is curated by Vanessa McRae and David Broker and features thirteen artists: Peter Booth, Kirsty Bruce, Gail Cowley, Ritchie Ares Dona, Christian Flynn, Kirra Jamison, Davina Kelly, Jennifer Lowrey, Daniel McKewen, Emma McLean, Paul Mumme, Andrew Rewald, and Florence Tetuira. One of the high points is Kirsty Bruce's installation of hundreds of small drawings and paintings on paper religiously reproducing images from teen and fashion magazines. Sprinkled across the wall, Bruce's inventory of poses suggests a teenage girl's bedroom wall papered with favourite images. For complete contrast, Emma McLean stars in her own narcissistic video nasty, eating and regurgitating sausage meat. Her gross-out suggests a porn movie, albeit one that may not give us pleasure. [image: Kirsty Bruce]

Catalogue Essay

Mirror Worlds showcases the work of Asian video artists who interrogate the constant stream of moving images we habitually turn to for news, entertainment, and information: Heman Chong and Corinna Kniffki (Singapore/Berlin), Junebum Park (Korea), Wit Pimkanchanapong (Thailand), Rashid Rana (Pakistan), Sharmila Samant (India), Chen Shaoxiong (China)m and Kiran Subbaiah (India). In Junebum Park's works giant hands appear to operate heavy engineering vehicles, park cars, and affix ads to building facades—an omnipotent sandpit fantasy. Chen Shaoxiong's Anti-Terrorism Variety is equally miraculous, as high-tech skyscrapers in Shanghai and Guangzhou use a diversity of strategies to avoid or repel incoming 9/11 missile-aeroplanes. Curated by Zoe Butt and Bec Dean; a joint project with the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. [image: Junebum Park]

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Russian group AES+F (Tatiana Arzamosa, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes) are notorious for parodying the ideologies of our new world order. Their video trilogy The King of the Forest is based on the medieval European folktale of the Erl-King, who kidnaps beautiful children and holds them in his palace. Playing on the way advertising exploits children by attaching their appeal to diverse even contradictory products and principles, AES+F marshal cute children and film them in their whites in a mirror-lined palace in St Petersberg, a mosque in Cairo, and New York's Times Square. Their point is that children are at once captured and captivating.

Catalogue Essay

German filmmaker Stefan Romer introduces his new feature-length documentary Conceptual Paradise tracing the debates that gave rise to Conceptual Art in the 1960s. He explores conceptual art historically and as a touchstone for current work. Important subjects emerge, including the problematic conceits of 'global-conceptualism' and 'dematerialisation’; ontological and ethical questions regarding authorship; and the role of the impressario-dealer Seth Siegelaub. A joint project with David Pestorius Projects, with support from Queensland University of Technology Visual Arts and Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. [image: Joseph Kosuth]

Queensland-born Sydney-based John Gillies is one of Australia's longest-standing video artists. This show features key works stretching back over twenty-two years that collectively highlight his exploration of the languages and materials of film and video and his ongoing collaboration with performing artists. A catalogue of hysterical gestures, Techno/Dumb/Show (1991), produced in collaboration with The Sydney Front, is one of Gillies's most celebrated pieces. The Mary Stuart Tapes (2000) evolved out of a performance Gillies developed with Clare Grant and presented at Performance Space in 1998. Gillies has Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, played by Grant, walking through present-day Sydney's streets and underground walkways at night declaiming to the camera. The most recent work, Divide (2004), draws on the genre of the Australian outback 'western' and is the most conventionally cinematic piece in the show. Gillies describes it: 'A voice speaking from the Old Testament, of the colonisation of the land of Canaan through the genocidal acts of the Israelites, is juxtaposed over a group of non-indigenous male figures journeying into an Australian landscape. The cultural layering and ambiguity in the work speaks of the foundation of Australia, its current fears and neuroses and the intruder as both destroyer and powerless witness. Sheep flock together in fear and panic, but are easily led by leaders who wander across the country, unreconciled.' Indeed, sheep play a crucial but ambiguous role in Gillies' allegory. Do they refer to indigenous people being herded across the landscape, or the incoming European culture? Do we understand them as pathetic lambs-to-the-slaughter or as hooved descecrators, trashing the land?

Catalogue Essay

A few years ago Korean-born New-Zealand-based artist Jae Hoon Lee began using a flat bed scanner to digitally document his bad skin. He recorded sores, pores, freckles, and hairs in gross detail, pressed up against the glass. He collaged the scans to suggest vast sheets of skin, uncannily flat bodyscapes. Sometimes he digitally healed his skin, other times digitally multiplied sores. These deranged self-portraits were presented as videos, scrolling across the image. A Leaf evolved from these works. Lee scanned and collaged leaves to create a massive meta-leaf with a continuous spine. Scrolling down the image, the video suggests a leaf rapidly growing, mutating. As A Leaf passes through green summer leaf, red autumnal leaf and dead winter leaf, it evokes seasonal cycles, life and death, combining a sublime-monstrous organicism with a sense of glitchy techno-digital artifice. The soundtrack could be cicadas, could be electronic noise.

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called Matthew Barney 'the most important artist of his generation'. Wagnerian, magisterial, and just plain weird, Barney's Cremaster Cycle is a psycho-sexual odyssey. Eight years in the making (1994-2002), it is named after the muscle which drives involuntary testicular contractions. The five films are rife with allusions to the reproductive organs' position during embryonic sexual differentiation. Arcane and audacious, compacted and multilayered, hermetic yet all-encompassing, these surreal costume dramas reach back into mythologies, biologies and geologies of creation, and look forward to a world of modified genetics, high-tech prosthesies, and malleable high-performance identities. They ingest material from a dizzying array of sources: Manx, Mormon, and Masonic. Extreme sport meets extreme religion. Action shifts from a sports stadium in Barney's home town of Boise, Idaho, to a Budapest Opera House. Riddled with art references and ramifications the Cycle was the subject of a massive exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2003.

Clocking in at two hours and fifteen minutes, Barney's latest film Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) was shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru. Its core idea is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid vaseline called The Field, which is poured, molded, bisected, and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film. Barriers hold the form in place, and when they are removed, the film tracks its atrophy. This physical change is mirrored through the narrative of the Guests, two occidental visitors to the ship played by Barney and Bjork (who also provides the soundtrack). They take part in a tea ceremony. As a powerful lightning storm breaks out overhead, the tatami mat room they occupy floods with liquid vaseline, which we sense has emanated from The Field itself. In a harrowing climax, the Guests, locked in an embrace and breathing through blowhole-like orifices on the backs of their necks, take out flensing knives and cut away each other's feet and thighs. The remains of their lower bodies are revealed to contain traces of whale tails at an early stage of development, suggesting rebirth, physical transformation, the possibility of new forms.

This is the first in a series of IMA@Dendy collaborations.

It is now becoming clear that geometry—and therefore proportion—is the hidden law of the universe. It is even more fundamental than mathematics, for all the laws of nature can be derived directly from sacred geometry.
—Drunvalo Melchizedek

The IMA in collaboration with the Pope Alice Xorporation presents an evening at the Lemurian Embassy with Raelian artist Luke Roberts. For decades Roberts has explored the connections between art, religion, spirituality, and science. He will present his research into crop circles—the most extraordinary public artworks occurring on Planet Earth today—and their connection with Sacred Geometry. With an appearance by Her Divine Holiness Pope Alice, Curator of the Universe and Patron of the Cosmic Wunderkammer. Music and sound by Jandy Rainbow. NO RELIGIOUS PERSUASION EXERTED / NO CONVERSION NECESSARY / MASS HYSTERIA WELCOMED.

New Zealand collective et al. are known for their moody installations linking art, technology, political ideologies, scientific theories, fringe religious practices, and Cold-War-style behaviour modification. the second of the ordinary practices develops out of their 2005 Venice Biennale project, the fundamental practice. Recorded and computer-generated voices read extremist texts from within five crudely constructed APUs (autonomous purification units). Resembling sentry boxes and orgone accumulators, the APUs move back and forth on wires behind cyclone-fencing enclosures. We don’t know if they are the prisoners or the warders. Their purpose—malicious or benevolent—remains unfathomable. An adjacent computer control room includes a video projection of an aerial view of Baxter Internment Camp, a live feed from Google Earth. Superimposed on this scene like giant obelisks are five stylised APUs.

Catalogue Essay

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and video artist based in New York. Her poetic two-channel video installation Tooba is based on the Koran, in which Tooba, the sacred tree of paradise, offers shelter and sustenance to those in need. Neshat’s video places a woman within a groove in the trunk of a large fig tree, symbolising its soul. They stand, alone, in a stone-walled garden set in a mountainous landscape. Men and women draw near and enter the enclosure, seeking refuge, as the Tooba-woman disappears into the Tooba-tree. The piece is ambiguous. Who has agency? Is it the crowd, who 'invade' the garden or the tree-woman who draws them towards her like a magnet? Tooba is dedicated to Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipour, whose novel Women without Men concerns five women sojourning in a garden, one of whom is transformed into a tree. Neshat is currently working on a feature film based on Women without Men. Thanks to Auckland Art Gallery and the Thanksgiving Foundation.

Catalogue Essay

Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio has been showing his constructions, collages and watercolours since the early 1980s. In an age of brash biennale art, his work is usually distinguished by its modesty of scale and material, its intimacy and ephemerality. Seeking to express the spiritual interconnectedness of all things, Carchesio combines iconographies drawn from early modernist abstraction and other faiths to ponder our relation to nature and the cosmos. His new project Everything Takes Time / Time Takes Everything combines a geometric-pattern wall painting, an ambient electronic soundtrack, and 'the space between'.

Catalogue Essay

New-York-based Swiss artist Olaf Breuning is our international artist-in-residence this year. He is a master of the constructed scenario. In his videos, photos, and installations, he dishes up a fantasy world of glam-trash quotations, an archive of alternative realities. Equally enamoured with heavy metal and counter-culture, historical romance and serial-killer splatter, the courtly and the bogan, he constructs bizarre intersections of reality and simulation in which pop culture's interlocking cliches are amplified and exploded. His eclectic work provokes contrasting feelings of discomfort and fascination, repulsion and seduction, embarrassment and intrigue.

Our show features Breuning's video Home, a 32-minute double-screen mini-epic filmed in a range of exotic settings. On one screen Home’s deranged globetrotting narrator bounces off the walls of a swanky hotel room while introducing a series of anecdotes which are enacted on the other screen. Each episode spirals into weirdness. In one, gang members tyrannise a young Amish man, stripping him, pulling an E.T. mask over his head, and chasing him across a field. Allowing us no time to morally digest the implications of this, the narrator launches into more crazed yarns, taking on the personas of a drug dealer, a cowboy, and a vagrant. Breuning dissolves the borders between daily life and the dream worlds of fashion, film, and TV. The show also includes the installation Ghosts (a collaboration with fashion designer Bernhard Wilhelm), a selection of photographs, and Mrs Loot, a primitivist totem cobbled together from purchases from Loot, the ethnic-homewares chainstore. A joint project with Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, supported by Prohelvetia/Arts Council of Switzerland.

Catalogue Essay

Brisbane’s Sandra Selig made her name with her sublime site-specific installations, where curving planes are suggested through the regular disposition of threads strung through the gallery space between architectural points, suggesting weightless ephemeral geometric forms. One is permanently installed in the new Brisbane Magistrates Court. Selig’s work has now branched out in a number of directions. However consistent features are the use and investigation of modest everyday materials—including string, straws, paper, polystyrene balls, flyscreen mesh, and cobwebs; an interest in mathematics, geometry, patterning, and gestalt effects; and a fascination with the insubstantial qualities of atmosphere, light, and sound.

Catalogue Essay

We'll be at the Melbourne Art Fair, 2–6 August, presenting No Place Like Home, a new project by Brisbane’s Scott Redford. The show develops out of his recent models for public sculptures based on Las-Vegas style Gold-Coast motel signage. Redford is fascinated by the Gold Coast, his home town, with its Las Vegas flourishes, its pastel high-rises, and surfer boys. He sees it as a parallel world that fulfils and contradicts our notions of modernity and post-modernity. He explains: 'What attracts me is that no matter what is said about it, it will always exceed and disappoint our expectations. It is a sort of rebus or mirror. It can be projected onto and reviled. It is both beautiful and a whore. Utopia and distopia. You get the picture? I think it is ART.' Redford's Melbourne Art Fair project will argue a link between the Gold Coast's motel signs and Russian revolutionary-period 'event architecture', like Tatlin’s infamous Monument to the Third International. It will also include two new 'surf paintings', paintings made using surfboard making materials and techniques.

Catalogue Essay

Brisbane aboriginal artist Richard Bell's work develops out of protest politics, responding to a history of oppression and discrimination. While he challenges non-aboriginal artists who appropriate aboriginal imagery, he is an appropriation artist himself, borrowing from artists like Imants Tillers and Emily Kngwarreye to score his points. His recent works draw extensively on the comics-appropriating pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, who made dot canvasses before Papunya. Bell's work is a series of timely provocations: he critiques the appropriators of aboriginal art, he challenges the perceived divide between traditional and modern aboriginal art, and he inverts black/white stereotypes. He is famous for Bell's Theorem: 'Aboriginal Art — it's a white thing'. After winning the 2003 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, he generated a national controversy by collecting his award in a T-shirt with the slogan 'White Girls Can't Hump'. Positivity surveys Bell's agit-pop work from the early 1990s to now. Supported by QIAMEA.

See Bell's new video Uz Vs. Them.

Catalogue Essay

Developed out of a joint residency at Melbourne's Meat Market, Emily Floyd and Julia Gorman's playful exhibition dialogues on the language of sculpture. Spelling out an excerpt from Anna Chave's seminal feminist essay 'Minimalism and Biography', Floyd's installation seeks a feminist voice within the masculine paradigm of minimalism, testing the relevance of feminism for contemporary art. Gorman's adhesive vinyl wall drawings and her sheet-metal and cardboard-and-balloon sculptures riff on modernist sculpture from Calder to Hepworth, Warner Brothers cartoons, and 1970s graphic design. Her forms and materials suggest doubt, paranoia, insecurity and fear, as well as parties and fun. [image: Julia Gorman]

Catalogue Essay

Polish artist Artur Zmijewski examines human nature at its most revealing and vulnerable. In his video The Game Of Tag a group of people – variously aged, sexed and shaped – play tag in the nude in two locations. They go through a variety of attitudes. Sometimes the game is fast and furious, sometimes slow. Some players seem at ease, others ashamed; some giggle, others are focussed. At the end we learn the two locations are the basement of a private home and a former concentration camp gas chamber. Zmijewski writes: 'In this small house made of concrete, where people were killed with Cyklon B, huge yellowish navy-blue bruises made by the gas were still visible on the walls.' The Game Of Tag presents a conundrum: how to read it? We can only speculate as to why the director and his cast members are doing this and what their personal relation to the Holocaust might be. Are they simply seeking to shock us? Are we to read it as an allegory, with participants locked in a conflict oblivious of a common external threat? Or perhaps the point is that they are exorcising anxiety around a history of genocide through play. The Game Of Tag is a psychology experiment in which the viewer is also playing a part. Zmijewski represented Poland at the last Venice Biennale.

Sydney’s Hany Armanious's formally diverse work is marked by its perverse conflation of opposing values. He morphs high-minded modernist formalism into hippie neo-paganism, confuses Scandanavian modernism with Arabian bazarr kitsch, and short circuits Bauhaus 'intelligent design' with Raelian 'intelligent design'. Sometimes he seems to make bogus analogies with the seriousness of a conspiracy theorist, other times with prankster humour. However his underlying point is phenomenological, pointing to the turns of mind that generate these errors. His work exploits our tendency to make links between things which resemble one another in form, material, function, and process, on the way providing a corrective to the blunt modernist formalism that informs the work of many of his contemporaries.

Armanious named his show Morphic Resonance after Rupert Sheldrake’s whimsical pseudo-scientific new-age theory. Sheldrake coined the term to describe the unseen interconnectedness of things, and his faith in the magical influence they exert upon one another at a distance. In framing Armanious's exhibition, however, these words now suggest what happens when artworks are brought together—the way they resonate with and infect one another as forms and signs; the way their logics echo, mesh with, and complicate one another; the way they make new meanings in new configurations. A joint project with City Gallery Wellington.

Catalogue Essay

Recent Queensland video works, some seen for the first time. Archie Moore's False Friends features snippets from learning-foreign-language recordings which he has misheard as English. He transliterates them and reorders them to suggest a vulgar narrative. Peter Alwast's CAD animation ShwAAA offers a hybrid city-language-video-scape recalling Archigram's futurist follies from the 1960s. Van Sowerwine's maudlin award-winning stop-frame doll-animation Clara sees one girl mourning the death of another. Parodying a pain-endurance performance document, Paul Mumme's looped video shows a match burning endlessly, gripped between two fingers. It's painful only for the viewer. Chris Bennie creates budget sci-fi FX by recording data-projector lens flare in Down to Earth. Jemima Wyman's Lady in Red films herself from above and below while singing the song. Extreme angles make her sexy and grotesque. Sandra Selig contributes one of her 'inframaterial field recordings' in which we see (and hear) overlapping screens move across one another, generating moire patterns. [image: Peter Alwast]

Our new touring show Supercharged brings together the work of twelve artists exploring the car’s iconic status in Australian life: Roderick Bunter, Sadie Chandler, Bill Henson, Martin Mischkulnig, Tracey Moffatt, Ben Morieson, Louise Paramor, Patricia Piccinini, Scott Redford, Tim Ryan, Daniel Wallwork, and Anne Zahalka. Since its development in the early years of the last century, the car has played a pivotal role in Australian cultural life. Where travel and communication has been restricted by the tyranny of distance, the car has provided freedom. It has enjoyed a major role in the business and leisure activities of Australians from every corner of the continent. But the car is more than practical, it is symbolic, a marker of status and identity. Latrobe Regional Gallery, 4 November–10 December 2006; Mildura Art Centre, 8 March–22 April 2007; 24 Hr Art, Darwin, 1 June–6 July 2007; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 5 October–18 November 2007; Pinnacles Gallery, Thuringowa, 23 November 2007–13 January 2008; Logan Art Gallery, 12 February–15 March 2008; and Redcliffe Art Gallery, 24 March–26 April 2008. Supported by Visions of Australia and the Gordon Darling Foundation. [Image: Louise Paramor]

Catalogue Essay

Queer was big in the 1990s. Bricks Are Heavy surveys Brisbane’s Scott Redford's 'Queer Project', with works from 1993 until now. Redford rereads and rewrites familiar modernist artforms, excavating or imputing queerness. The show includes his iconic Not the Formula for Population Standard Deviation; a minimalist wall painting of white paint laced with AIDS and other medications; an installation of life size photos of sublime glistening metal urinals recalling Rothko and Newman; various devotions to Kurt, River and Keanu; plus several recent videos. The exhibition title implies the weightiness of identity politics.

Catalogue Essay