The Institute of Modern Art has a reputation for bringing exciting new art and artists to public attention. Platform is our annual Queensland-emerging-artists exhibition. Each year three artists receive funding to create ambitious new projects. This year we showcase new works by Dean Ansell, Spencer Harvie, and Seren Wagstaff.

‘Dean Ansell, Spencer Harvie, and Seren Wagstaff are the cream of the crop’, says IMA Director Robert Leonard. ‘The Institute of Modern Art is a talent scout, identifying and elevating exciting new artists as their work is breaking. For gallery goers, it’s an opportunity to discover tomorrow’s art today, as it emerges.’

Dean Ansell interprets Melanesian mythologies and rituals. Their monolithic metal sculpture considers the ocean as an archive of ancestry and cultural knowledge. Engraved Melanesian tattoo designs—signifying status, land, and animals—are revealed as water trickles over, rusting the metal. Ansell will present three performances activating their sculpture through howling, whale song, and spellcasting, the first during the opening on Friday 30 January.

‘I am honoured to be a part of Platform 2026 and am grateful for this opportunity. I look forward to offering a glimpse into the vast, intricate culture of my ancestors, the Riḡorabana, the Balawaia’, says Ansell.

Processing AI-generated slop, found imagery, and imagined imagery within a cartoon logic, Spencer Harvie explores dark, surreal, absurd aspects of online and fan subcultures and their intersection with art history. Two large canvases offer Bruegelesque hellscapes, while forty drawings zoom in on excruciating details. A sculptural stack of deformed rat heads in top hats sits behind a gawping rat mouth, recalling the entrance to Luna Park.

‘I’m thrilled and grateful that the IMA supported my vision’, says Harvie. ‘Their confidence in its realisation speaks to the institution’s commitment to art proper.’

Seren Wagstaff implies queer innuendos at play within blue-collar, working-class subcultures—like fishing. In their kinetic sculptures, phallic fishing rods, jutting out from the walls, are suggestively flexed by sex-toy motors. Wagstaff will perform in the installation with collaborators, turning the rods into an orchestral machine.

‘Platform and the IMA have been invaluable in supporting experimentation and risk-taking within my practice at a formative moment’, says Wagstaff.

Alongside Platform 2026, we present John Stezaker: Kisses and Trains. The celebrated English artist is known for his witty, surrealist collages. He also makes flicker films, collaging images in time; animating found images of similar subjects with similar compositions, twenty-four a second.

The Screening Room hosts manifesto films by Archigram and Superstudio, collectives of paper architects who emerged in the 1960s and responded to the pop-art, space-age zeitgeist, imagining architectural futures typified by high-tech, plug-in megastructures.

Quarter One opens on Saturday 24 January, with opening celebrations on Friday 30 January.