Our July Showcase was a good time, thanks to Melbourne-based artist Jess Milne, with 'CLYDE' in the Main Gallery and debut solo exhibition, 'man/woman' by Toowoomba local Stephen Payton in the Project Space.
Melbourne based artist, Jess Milne, produces work that undergoes it’s conception during travel. For ‘Clyde’ she reversed this statement and attempted to create work a traveller can rely upon. Accompanied by performance artist, Lachlan Stuckey, Milne conducted a week long experiment between Melbourne and Toowoomba in an effort to camp ‘successfully’ with an array of camping equipment fabricated in the studio. After stopping at the Blue Mountains and Cathedral Rock along the way, Clyde pulled up at 6 Laurel St and we kicked off our July showcase.
These objects lived double lives as art and as ‘functional apparatus’, traversing between being useful, and becoming artefacts of performance. The exhibition brought together a trail of visual information created between Melbourne and First Coat Studios reflecting upon campsite happenings and challenges.
Alongside 'CLYDE' in the Project Space, ‘man/woman’ was a conceptual installation drawing together new and selected poems from Toowoomba-local, multidisciplinary artist, Stephen Payton, with a focus on the androgyny of mind. Payton formulated the concept for this show upon the reading of Haruki Murakami’s Men without Women; in addition to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Woolf suggests that when a fusion of the male-female mind takes place it is “resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”
This beautiful installation of text-based work marks the first the solo exhibition for Payton, as an English Literature graduate with a hungry appetite for the ‘art’ of storytelling, Payton is interested in how ‘literary affect’ can arouse emotion and memory in the individual.
Concerning himself with the way in which language in its unedited, unadulterated state can convey more with fewer words. Payton cites the aforementioned Murakami, and Woolf as influences as well as the large-scale poetry installations of Robert Montgomery.
