Platform—our new annual exhibition series—showcases new work by emerging artists under forty, who were born, live, or lived in Queensland, and who have not yet had a major solo exhibition in a public gallery. In 2024, we present new works by Miguel Aquilizan, Mia Boe, and Sarah Poulgrain.

Aquilizan is intuitive in his inquiry, improvisational in his approach, and inventive in his use of diverse and novel materials. His assemblages have a mysterious, magical quality, with one foot in science fiction and the post-human, another in totemism and animism. Aquilizan relates his love of found materials back to the Philippines, where he was born. There, things are never thrown away, but endlessly repurposed and reanimated. In one work, he hybridises two reproduction human skeletons, mocking the idealism of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. He says, ‘I like obscuring and mutating what is familiar, making everything alien.’

Boe is a painter of Butchulla and Burmese ancestry whose work responds to colonisation and the mistreatment of people and culture in K’gari and Burma/Myanmar. Her paintings feature elongated figures that often float in the landscape, representing ancestral spirits, family members, and historical figures. For Platform, she has created a six-panel painting responding to ‘Connoisseur’, a poem by Uncle Lionel Fogarty that challenges the ways white academics have classified Indigenous people and framed their experiences. The colonisers’ ‘philosophy, theory, and encyclopedia’ are ‘unsophisticated to our Murri Imagined realistic minds’, Fogarty explains.

Poulgrain is an artist whose work is grounded in labour and skill sharing. A frequent collaborator and facilitator, their work is based in learning and sharing skills, from welding to weaving. They live and work in a former bike-wrecker’s workshop in Woolloongabba, which they renovated with friends. It is also home to Wreckers Artspace, an artist-run initiative they co-founded. Having recently experienced a flood and faced with the prospect of losing their home to gentrification, Poulgrain teamed up with friends to build a houseboat, an ark. Like their current home, the boat is half residence, half gallery. It will soon be launched on Brisbane River. In Platform, Poulgrain presents the gallery half, which is curated with works by Alrey Batol, Charlie Hillhouse, and Leen Rieth—the space’s first show. Here, it’s an institution within an institution, a platform within a platform, an alternative within an alternative.