We’re excited to share some moments from the opening celebration of our September Exhibitions featuring 'Deeply Disturbed and Surprisingly Functional' by Jacinta Giles and Annelize Mulder and 'Postcards from Italy' by Fiona Cockfield.
September saw “Deeply disturbed and surprisingly functional” by Jacinta Giles and Annelize Mulder hang in the Main Gallery. The duo delivered concepts that relate to disturbances in the human experience. It is safe to say that each person carries the remnants of various life occasions, both good and bad. The flippant reference to being “disturbed” yet functioning, suggests that humans are mostly functional, burying our darker moments. It lingers as we go about life. In this exhibition, the artists scratch at these deeply embedded components through imagery, metaphor and abstraction.
Giles and Mulder are emerging artists from Brisbane, both at various stages of post-graduate studies at the Queensland College of Art. Giles' and Mulder’s art practices are diverse yet forge strong commonalities. Giles' practice uses the materiality of photomontage and film editing to capture the fragility of our humanness. Often described as painterly and poetic, her cinematically composed vignettes suggest half-remembered dreams or memory traces of a real in an increasingly abstracted world.
Mulder’s practice centres around migration experiences and specifically that of South African migrants. Memory triggers and traces of a violent society often surface involuntary for these migrants. These moments are investigated through sculpture and installation in an attempt to capture these disconcerting feelings. Giles' and Mulder’s works are layered with the legacies of human interaction and the troubling side of life. Both artists arrive at a central place that deals with these experiences, initiated from different vantage points.
Inspired by the words of Beirut, Fiona Cockfield brought her dreamy new body of work, ‘Postcards from Italy’ to the Project Space.
‘And I would love to see that day, that day is mine.’ Beirut
In the book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes how he resolved to travel to the island of Barbados after receiving a brochure with an image that reminded him of William Hodges’ painting, Tahiti Revisited (1776). A mere photograph of a ‘palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze’ created a fantasy that was complete within de Botton’s mind. Similarly, many of Fiona Cockfield's fantasies have been sparked by the most simple experiences, ideas and imagery, forged from reality and re-created as her own fantasy. This concept is the premise for Postcards from Italy.
Fantasies, by their very nature, encompass much of the ‘real’ and therefore shift from that pure space of the imagination into the interstitial space between the concrete and the abstract. This concept has been an aspect of Cockfield's practice for quite some time. For this exhibition, the artist explores the philosophical premise of the real and the abstract on a personal level whereby her experiences of travel and ideas of lifestyle form the material for fantasies of escapism, purity and simplicity of life.
