Game embraces art and life links
LOCAL and regional exhibitions challenge and embrace the relationships between art and life as a board game, as a plea to respect the environment, and as homage to a family matriarch’s courage and resilience.
RAYGUN, 249 Margaret St, is hosting a tabletop game courtesy of artist David Akenson. “Participatory Game # 4: Kusama” salutes the dots of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in tokens used in a board game set out on a Mondrian-like grid. Akenson tends to refute Wittgenstein’s notion that rules and competition fail to define a game.
He adopts an approach more attuned to recent philosophers such as Bernard Suits and Thomas Hurka who saw games as the pursuit of goals governed by restrictions yet open to compromise through a playful, lusory attitude in overcoming obstacles. The game, a structured form of play, becomes a metaphor for life. The participation of viewers, their awareness of the rules, their line of attack and response turns them into players of a game that offers a verisimilitude of art and life.
The Crows Nest Regional Art Gallery is presenting “Remnant Inception,” an exhibition by Julie Sweeney. Concerns about the fragility of nature, the depletion of native fauna and flora, and the ever-increasing advances of human intervention and encroaching suburbia are translated into textile wall pieces.
Sweeney has used screen printing, mono printing and eco printing to create delicate feathers and leaf patterns as well as layered fabrics enhanced by free motion sewing to accentuate details. Sewn landscapes, such as “Winter Wattle” and the magpie chorus from the “Backyard Series”, add depth to the compositions while the softly muted tones in prints of leaves from endangered trees have a solemn gravity. A feature of the exhibition is a selection of potted plants of local native flora available for purchase and supplied by the Crows Nest Community Nursery.
The Rosalie Gallery in Goombungee is featuring the work of twin sisters, Susan Cook and Wendy McNeil. The exhibition, “The Legacy of Maggie Dunn” pays homage their great grandmother. As 18 year olds the girls moved to New Zealand where they lived and worked for over twenty years.
Upon returning to Australia they re-connected with family and a cousin who was researching the family tree. It was through this that they learnt about their great grandmother, Maggie Dunn an Indigenous woman of the Iman people from the Taroom region. Maggie Dunn’s children were part of the Stolen Generation and as her story unfolded Susan and Wendy realized that the fortitude, stoicism, and courage of this woman, their ancestor, had to be honoured and revered.
The exhibition combines aspects of the women’s own art training and experience with a contemporary Indigenous spin that links tradition with modernism to produce colourful statements that link culture and history to a personal vision.