Volume II

Volume II

24 October–12 December 200924 Oct–12 Dec 2009

In 2006, we presented Greatest Hits / Previously Unreleased Tracks, a selection of video works from Queensland artists. It toured. Volume II is a follow up, showcasing recent and not-so-recent videos by Queensland artists that we have worked with over the last couple of years. Aaron Burton’s Paradise is a sordid documentary about partying kids at Surfers Paradise. Grants Stevens’sMatter satirises cosmic awe, the unthinkable numbers involved in imagining the universe. Indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee scrambles identity codes in his perverse self-portrait Whitefellanormal, originally produced as a thirty-second TV ad. The participants in Laith McGregor’sBall Games seem to be flirting with us (or engaged in some bizarre form of self-pleasuring), until we realise what’s really going on. Jemima Wyman’s The Difficult Word is based on a peepshow-style performance, where viewers placed their heads through apertures in a soft-sculpture enclosure to watch the artist abjectly writhe around under disco lights, fully encased in stretchy, stripey, glittery clothes. Sculptor Lincoln Austin carries his abstract optical enquiries into video. Hiromi Tango observes herself asleep, cocooned in one of her installations. Gabriella and Silvana Mangano’s videos combine their interests in drawing and self-portaiture; their Drawing 2 is shot from photographs of the twins wearing photocopied masks, as if to hide from the camera while they apparantly stare into it.