The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) has a reputation for experimentation. Setting fires, piercing walls, and grappling with violence, the IMA’s new exhibitions open on Saturday 18 April.  

Robert Leonard, IMA Director, says: ‘It’s great to be doing two confident, big sculpture projects by Queensland artists. Quadrio and Scott have very different sensibilities, but both can make a big claim on space’. 

Trawlwoolway woman and Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist, Mandy Quadrio, presents her first major institutional solo show, Kukanna Murraweena, supported by the IMA Commissioners Circle and Creative Australia’s Visual Art, Craft, and Design Framework Funding. The exhibition features an austere forest of suspended steel-wool sculptures and Quadrio’s first moving-image work, showing burning steel-wool with a soundtrack of the artist singing with her late sister. The title translates to ‘holding the weight of silence’. The sculpture’s womb-like forms suggest generations of maternal comfort–a copse within which we might commune safely with the past, despite colonialist attempts to scrub her and her people away.  

‘It’s an invaluable opportunity to create work for the IMA on a grand scale’, says Quadrio. ‘There’s a performative aspect in the sculptures and in the burning of the steel wool that is quite spectacular’. 

Erika Scott’s Cambium Itch takes the junk of consumer culture and transforms it into a sensual explosion. Piercing the walls with hundreds of PVC pipes, Scott turns the gallery into a supersized ‘pin-art toy’, filled with mounds of hard-rubbish detritus. ‘Cambium’ refers to the tissue layer from which cells differentiate. Scott taps into the layer where creative thought might multiply and emerge. Cambium Itch is supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and Redland City Council.  

The Screening Room hosts Cartoon Violence, featuring 3D animated videos by American artists Takeshi Murata and Bunny Rogers that grapple with cartoon violence and masculinity. Murata’s I, Popeye (2010) turns the eponymous sailor man into a crudely 3D-rendered subject suffering an existential crisis. In Rogers’s Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), a woman performs in mourning of the victims of the Columbine High School shooting. 

Quarter Two opens with evening celebrations at the IMA’s Fortitude Valley gallery on Friday 17 April from 6pm.