Queensland Contemporary Art – QAGOMA Blog

Queensland Contemporary Art – QAGOMA Blog

The exhibition ‘Embodied Knowledge’ may perhaps have closed, nevertheless you can even now delve into our movie archive of Queensland modern art and artists from the significantly north, the Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait Islands to Moreton Bay and bordering Brisbane.

DELVE Further: Artists and artworks

PUBLICATION: Offered at the QAGOMA Keep and on the net

‘Embodied Expertise: Queensland Contemporary Art’ journeys by means of the state’s large inventive landscape, exploring performs of art that make noticeable something of our identity, heritage and record as Queenslanders.

Heather Marie (Wunjarra) Koowootha

Wik-Mungkan and Yidinji/Djabugay peoples / Born 1966, Yarrabah / Lives and will work in Cairns.

When Heather Marie (Wunjarra) Koowootha seen the portraits of Australia’s former prime ministers hanging in the halls of Parliament Home, Canberra, she was struck by the lack of To start with Nations leaders. In reaction, the artist was compelled to create one thing that would instruct her grandchildren about leaders who have shaped their have Indigenous spouse and children, whose connections stretch from Innisfail in far north Queensland to the Torres Strait.

https://www.youtube.com/observe?v=Y-1CBGVvbsI

Callum McGrath

Born 1995, Brisbane / Lives and operates in Melbourne, Victoria

Callum McGrath’s photos of individuals convening at birthdays or holidaying jointly have been replaced by shots of queer memorials and spaces of celebration. The artist deliberately deploys the format of the spouse and children picture album to attract notice to the way that kinship in queer communities can be created by actively nurturing one’s ‘family of choice’ alternatively than those tied to you by organic replica. McGrath’s use of newbie pictures acknowledges that uncovering the earlier is normally an intuitive course of action that necessitates looking through among the traces of archives or browsing inside of unofficial resources. By inserting these monuments within just the vernacular format of the relatives album, he seeks to emphasise how queer tales are also typically still left out of formal background guides.

https://www.youtube.com/enjoy?v=BX1PF3qC9YA

Ethel Murray

Girramay/Jirrbal peoples / Born 1964, Tully / Life and performs in Cardwell

Ethel Murray creates her outsized up to date bigin by knotting brightly coloured rope to a steel protect construction. Her use of fibre disrupts the clear, symmetrical graphic strains of the initial totemic symbology. Coincidentally, the old shield design and style drawings by her father, which encouraged this collection of sculptures, have been at first rendered on gridded graph paper — a technique that has allowed Murray to upscale and translate the line operate into this new medium.

https://www.youtube.com/enjoy?v=tYhznrW93ss

Obery Sambo

Meriams of Mer / Born 1970, Thursday Island / Lives and works in Townsville

Obery Sambo comes from a extensive line of grasp mask- and headdress‑makers from Mer (Murray Island), residence to the Meriam persons of the eastern Torres Strait. Just one of the most properly-recognised symbols of the region is the outstanding feathered dhari headdress (highlighted on the Torres Strait flag). In addition to manufacturing these customary dhari, Sambo creates experimental interpretations of masks and headwear that are generally activated by means of dance by the Meuram Murray Island Dance Group.

https://www.youtube.com/observe?v=SCX2wDmmN3Q

https://www.youtube.com/view?v=PEQmvaDId68

Vanghoua Anthony Vue

Hmong people today / Born 1989, Sydney, New South Wales / Life and functions in Brisbane and Cairns.

Vanghoua Anthony Vue’s geometric mural and ornate headdress sculptures greet viewers with a cacophony of color and texture. In the ‘Tape-affiti’ series, the tape’s practical takes advantage of in ducting and electrical jobs, or to signal security troubles, are up-finished for purely aesthetic usually means. The collection is encouraged by the artist’s heritage, specifically Hmong textiles, stitched by women of all ages, whose intricate designs provide ritual functions and as political identification and are said to originate in a misplaced written language. The headdresses from Vue’s ‘Hard-hat Devi(l)-(n)ation’ series equally nod toward the opulent tailor made of Hmong headdresses. Screwdrivers, paint rollers and plastic pipes are only some of the objects elaborately interwoven atop hardhats in these vibrant sculptures. Instruments are adorned with sequins, plastic jewels, pompoms, electrical tape, plastic cable ties, washers and bolts.

https://www.youtube.com/observe?v=JJqDQ16xC2k

https://www.youtube.com/enjoy?v=dkcT8_sErKc

Moilang (Rosie) Ware

Torres Strait Islander awman (lady) / Born 1959, Thursday Island / Lives and operates between St Pauls (Wug village), Moa Island, and Thursday Island.

Artists of Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait) are known to be masters of carving, weaving and printmaking. Making use of a novel approach, Moilang (Rosie) Ware has defined her observe by handprinting linocut textiles that blend many tiled styles, displayed like prolonged scripts hanging from the wall. These artworks chronicle her culture and social historical past, repeating tales once more and once again, etching the narratives into collective memory in a related way to oral storytelling — passing them on to foreseeable future generations.

https://www.youtube.com/look at?v=AsrbJDoKNa8

Warraba Weatherall

Kamilaroi people today / Born 1987, Toowoomba / Lives and functions in Brisbane

Warraba Weatherall investigates museological collections that keep Indigenous human continues to be and cultural products from the artist’s Country and surrounds. It documents 10 objects held in countrywide collections, together with a grindstone, modified tree, pigment, stone axe, club, boomerang, protect, and skulls and bone fragments belonging to three ancestors. Weatherall has picked to solid the initial museum records of these objects as specific bronze memorial.

The removal of Indigenous Australian objects and human continues to be was a effectively-regarded incidence all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The breadth of the assortment of Indigenous cultural property, as properly as advocacy for their well timed repatriation to communities throughout the region, has been an place of discussion and analysis for a lot of decades. Weatherall’s operate critiques the integrity of collecting establishments that search for to ‘protect’ cultural objects by preserving them in secure environments. Institutional functions of ‘safekeeping’ separate these objects from descendants and their supposed makes use of.

https://www.youtube.com/observe?v=lC7IWvP6T-k

Justene Williams

Born 1970, Sydney, New South Wales / Lives and performs in Brisbane

Justene Williams humorously responses on the desire to ‘climb the ladder’ of the social and financial buy. Whilst shop mannequins once served as a materials translation of the best body, Williams stretches and distorts their limbs so thoroughly that they almost shed their romantic relationship to the human figure. The artist is not seeking to produce an absurd artwork somewhat, she attracts our focus to the ridiculousness of modern day capitalism — in this instance, the pictures designed by the manner marketplace for voracious use.

‘Embodied Awareness: Queensland Present-day Art’ / Queensland Artwork Gallery, Gallery 4, Gallery 5 (Henry and Amanda Bartlett Gallery) and the Watermall / 13 August 2022 to 22 January 2023

Highlighted picture: Installation look at of ‘Embodied Know-how: Queensland Modern Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, 2022 

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