News

We were amused and engaged by Andrew Frost's reading of our current show Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros on his website, The Art Life.

We are pleased to announce the artists selected for this year's emerging-artists show, Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2010. They are 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: Sally Golding]

At the AGM on Wednesday, the board was elected. They are: Richard Fidler (President), Anna Glass (Treasurer), Timothy Hill, Crow Hirst, John Kotzas, Andrew McNamara, Kim Machan, Douglas Quayle, Miranda Wallace (Vice President), Dirk Yates (Secretary), and Jay Younger.

Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut is the IMA's annual showcase for emerging Queensland artists. This year's instalment will feature four artists born or based in Queensland, up to six years out of art school, who have not shown at the IMA before. Each will be given $5000 towards the development of new work for the show. This support has been generously provided by our business partner, Brisbane Airport Corporation. Eligible artists are invited to submit portfolios and proposals for works they would do if successful. These should be posted (PO Box 2176, Fortitude Valley BC QLD 4006) or emailed to the Director (robert@ima.org.au) by 20 April. Mark submissions 'Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut'. Submissions will not be returned. We thank Brisbane Airport Corporation for their visionary support. Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2010 opens 7 August.

We are working with Naomi Stead, from the Architecture Theory Criticism History research group in the School of Architecture, University of Queensland, to stage a two-day academic symposium addressing the relationship between writing and architecture. Writing Architecture will take place on Thursday 22 July (at the State Library of Queensland) and Friday 23 July (at the Gallery of Modern Art).

Possible topics include: 

WRITING: When and how is writing an architectural practice? What is gained in translation, and what is lost, when architecture is represented in writing? What is the critical influence of writing—as itself a medium, technique, and mode of representation—in architectural criticism? What happens when architectural criticism becomes explicitly or implicitly literary, a mode of art practice?
CONVENTION: What are the genre conventions of architecture writing and architectural criticism? What do they arise from, and what would it mean to bend or break them? What might an experimental architectural writing look like?
MEDIATION: How does the vehicle and platform of publication affect what can be written, by whom and for whom? What can be said, differently and variously, in newspaper criticism, professional journals, popular journals, academic journals, books, and blogs? What are the potentials and limitations of architectural writing in the new media?
HISTORICITY: How does historical specificity bear on architectural criticism? Why would we read old critiques? How does contemporary criticism write buildings into history? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does criticism use, abuse, or depend on an architectural canon?
JUDGMENT: What is the significance of judgement in architectural critique? Has judgement been de-emphasised in current criticism in favour of description, interpretation, or evocation? What is the significance of architectural awards, prizes, and competitions, when seen as a mode of architectural criticism? What are the different kinds of criteria used to evaluate architecture in criticism, and which are correct? Is architectural criticism 'critical enough'? How could or should it be more or less so?
DISCIPLINARITY: What is the relationship between disciplinary architectural criticism, and broader cultural critiques that take architecture as an example? How do critical practices in architecture compare with and differ from critical practices in the visual and performing arts, design, film, television, and literature? How does architectural criticism implicitly or explicitly frame architecture as an art, a profession, a discipline, a service industry, a body of technique, an artifice?
OBJECT: What is the object of written architectural criticism? How important is architectural criticism, to whom, when, and why?

The symposium is being held in association with a two-day masterclass on innovative modes of writing and photography of Queensland places (19–20 July 2010). Anyone interested in presenting at or attending the symposium or participating in the masterclass should consult the project's webpage for further details. Writing Architecture received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Yesterday, none of the IMA staff came to work imagining that we might be visited by the awesome Amanda Palmer (from the Brechtian punk-cabaret band The Dresden Dolls), who was due to play at The Zoo that evening. Several of us are big fans. While on tour, Palmer often does impromptu performances alongside her big gigs. She calls them 'ninja gigs'. Receiving a tweet that she was looking for a venue, our enterprising designer Katrina Stubbs responded. And so, several hours later, we—and a massive entourage of her faithful top-hatted and black-corsetted fans—were treated an intimate audience. Palmer's buskeresque set closed with her cover of Radiohead's 'Creep', played on ukelele. It made our day.

New-York-based artist Anthony McCall, a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema, is giving a lecture. McCall is in the history books for his 1973 film-installation Line Describing a Cone, where he projected, through hazed air, a film of a white circle slowly forming on a black ground, in the process generating a spectral sculptural 'cone'. Through the 1970s, McCall developed this idea in a seies of 'solid light' films.

As he explained in 1974, a solid light film 'exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other ... every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form.'

At the end of the 1970s, McCall withdrew from art, but, over twenty years later, he has returned to the idea, using digital projectors rather than film ones. Come hear him talk. Thursday 11 March at 6pm. A joint project with OtherFilm. Thanks to Adam Art Gallery, Wellington.

Due to public demand—or outcry—we have decided to hold a forum on our current show Feminism Never Happened. It will be on the last day of the exhibition, Saturday 20 March, at 3pm. Panelists are Rex Butler (University of Queensland), Courtney Coombs (artist), Julie Ewington (Queensland Art Gallery), and Amanda Howell (Griffith University).

True to its name, this weekend's music festival The Lost Weekend was cancelled, leaving visiting acts stranded without a gig. We have grabbed this eleventh-hour opportunity to organise a concert with Melbourne art-hop renegades Curse Ov Dialect and Canadian laptoper Tim Hecker as part of our microMONO series, curated by Lawrence English (Room 40). Music Australia Guide described Curse Ov Dialect as 'tying traditional Middle Eastern and European folk, field recordings, and found sounds into a visceral, multilingual, and wildly experimental avant-hip-hop knot ... drawing from anything from psychedelic Turkish rock to Mandarin Opera'. The New York Times described Hecker's works as 'foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole'. Limited seating. First in, best dressed. Saturday 6 March at 7pm.

We are still hunting for our new Program Manager. Who will it be? We have extended the closing date for applications to Wednesday 17 March. This is an exciting, demanding job. The successful applicant will have experience in exhibition making and gallery management. They will be dynamic, well connected, passionate about contemporary art, and totally commited to the work of the organisation. They must be able to lead a small team and to take complete charge in the Director's absence. The full position description and selection criteria can be accessed here. Post your application addressing the selection criteria to 'Institute of Modern Art, PO Box 2176, Fortitude Valley BC QLD 4006, Australia', or email it to robert@ima.org.au.