Provoking art exhibitions
LOCAL and regional galleries are showing richly thought provoking exhibitions.
One goes to the heart of patriotism, survival, and vigilance and the other offers insight into artistic motivation that challenges traditional parameters of the genre of drawing as well as confirming it as a fundamental means of documentation.
The Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery is a versatile venue with an atrium exhibition space that invites the viewer to progress through a presentation as if on a visual journey.
This is very true for the current exhibition, The Footsteps of My Forebears-Horizons in Disruptive Pattern Camouflage, the work of Julian Thompson. The artist connects history and tradition through the role of the soldier, the military pawn in the dangerous game of warfare.
The soldier has become the solemn symbol of sacrifice- the unknown soldier, an every-man who upholds and defends a country’s values.
Soldiers undergo rigorous training; they are drilled and regimented, they become a defence machine but they are also flesh and blood human beings who must survive as well as fight and defend.
Art and the military are unlikely colleagues, yet, apart from the obvious need to document conflict, art has another more subtle mission.
Figure and ground studies are a part of art-making yet in the field of battle the blending of both through patterns of camouflage become essential to survival.
Thompson’s muscular canvases depict the slog of training regimes in which the landscape with its own patterns of filtered light, canopies of trees, and vegetation creates a setting through which the camouflaged soldier glides like breeze ruffling leaves.
The exhibition salutes history while giving a vigorous insight into the activities of the present.
The Warwick Art Gallery is hosting the ‘must see’ Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award exhibition on tour from the Grafton Regional Gallery.
JADA is a biennial event and this exhibition is showing work from the 2016 competition. Drawing has been a primary means of expression and documentation for centuries.
In our own era, technology has ruptured traditional modes
of drawing but has also provided additional freedom to push the boundaries and interrogate the very nature of drawing as an expressive medium.
This can be seen in the exhibition’s diverse offerings from Award winner Adam Cusack’s elegant still life, the sectional landscape by Mark Dober, and the vivid spatial planes by Susan Andrews, to the dramatic portraits by Esther Erlich, Nick Billington, and Andy Quilty.
The detail in Jane Grealy’s garden, the precision in the charcoal rendering of a falling tower by Simon Fry, the linear neon pistol by JP Willis, the unlikely combination of traditional Japanese Sumi-e ink technique and a street-smart car by Stephen Fearnley, and the visual narrative of life’s journey in the artist book by Slavica Zivkovic attest to the breadth and interpretive versatility of drawing.