Viewer adds to art exhibitions
ART exhibitions are about the ways of seeing, but they are not only about the artist’s vision. The viewer, too, is an active participant.
How the viewer reads and responds to the imagery filtered through their own experiences and associations adds a significant factor to the pleasure of gallery visits. Current exhibitions offer a wealth of visual experience that is challenging, exciting, disappointing, demanding, and gratifying.
The Alexandra Lawson Gallery, 2/5-7 Railway St, (Saturdays 7.30-11am),
is profiling “Seeing Painting,” an exhibition of new explorations by Tarn McLean.
In earth colours of red and ochre that hold the heat and vibrancy of chillies and turmeric, the works carry layers of paint that retain something of the identity of the linen canvas ground.
To the silence and stillness of her of monochromes McLean has added whispers of a darker tonality.
Although still retaining a minimal, reductive non objective approach, these tonal auras add an almost startling sense of spatial voids that threaten to suck the viewer through an unseen vortex into infinity. In the pair of canvases without stretchers the Rothkoesque delineation offers the viewer the possibility of a new reading of pictorial space.
No Comply Gallery, 6 Laurel St, is featuring “Qualia”, a series of video installations by Jade Courtney and Kirsty Lee. ‘Qualia’ is a term used in the imprecise science of analyzing the phenomenal properties of experience. Perception and the awareness of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch can include the memory of how the experience felt and this also becomes part of our sensory data bank.
The short films offer quick tantalizing takes of sensory perception such as floating in water, squeezing a handful of berries, colour as a gauge of emotion, and the human body as the object of the gaze.
Taste and smell are implied, allowing the viewer to add knowledge from their own experiences. Video art is born again in this totally engaging presentation.
The Arts Gallery at the University of Southern Queensland is hosting “Here, There, & Everywhere”, an exhibition in partial celebration of the University’s 50 anniversary featuring alumni from the Visual Arts Programme.
Some curious inclusions and some embarrassing omissions make for a hasty hit and miss exhibition that deserved more informed research.
With the potential to create a significant contribution to the cultural history of the region as well as the broader context of Australian contemporary arts practice, it was disappointing to find no documentation to encourage viewer interest or provide reference material for future researchers and cultural historians.
However, there are some highlights that offer a fascinating insight into the scope of contemporary practice by artists including Jean Cameron, Sandra Jarrett, Andrew MacDonald, Colin Reaney, Michael Schlitz, Jonathon Tse, Judy Watson, and Jay Younger.