Photos focus on local sites
ARTWORKS that challenge complacency, confound reality, offer individual responses to place, and pursue particular themes in a variety of materials provide forums for discussion in local and metropolitan exhibitions.
DUNMORE GALLERY
33 Dunmore Street, (Thu/Fri 12-2pm, Sat 12-3pm) is presenting Dichotomy, an intriguing exhibition by photographer and video artist Jade Courtney and painter Rhys Archer.
The polarity implied by the title is toyed with through a visual dialogue.
The works include the artists’ responses to key pointers such as mood, nude, self portrait, grotesque and obsession.
The first four have further visual prompts such as an anchor, a black dog, the colour red, and a teapot to trigger interpretation while ‘obsession’ remains a personal aberration explored by each artist.
Particularly memorable are the homages to art and literature in Courtney’s parodies of paintings by Manet and Magritte and in Archer’s salute to Marsyas.
The collaborative pieces are riveting if a little unnerving, while the tiny Polaroid prints are collectable gems.
THE TOOWOOMBA REGIONAL ART GALLERY
is featuring local landmarks in the exhibition, Same Sites, Hindsight.
In 1996, photographer Doug Spowart undertook the project New sight-Same sites to record the transition of local and regional locations depicted in artworks held in the city’s permanent collections.
Spowart’s images are a ‘warts and all’ documentation of the transformation of place in which progress is epitomised by power lines, the ubiquitous telegraph pole, and an encroaching urban density.
The challenge for Spowart was to determine the artists’ viewpoints; the challenge for us, almost twenty-five years later, is to try to find the site itself.
The exhibition presents a fascinating snippet of visual history that generates reminiscences and encourages conversations.
THE QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY
in Brisbane is hosting Jon Molvig: Maverick - an exhibition that honours one of the key figures in the Brisbane art scene of the 1950s and 1960s.
“Maverick” is an appropriate term for this artist whose unorthodox approach to art and to life established him as an innovative and provocative figure in the rather staid cultural climate of the time.
Molvig was a charismatic and inspirational teacher.
He was a passionate painter whose bravura of painterly gestures became a vehicle for emotional expression using colour draped and flung over a framework of articulate draughtsmanship.
He brought the influences of German and Norwegian expressionism to his depiction of Australian landscape imagery but incorporated a bold, antipodean palette.
His portraiture cut to the essence of the individual, presenting not only a likeness but psychological insight.
His portrait of friend and fellow artist Charles Blackman won the 1966 Archibald Prize.
The intense breadth of Molvig’s oeuvre shows influences translated through the exploration of style and medium by a significant artist from a particularly fertile period of Australian art history.
It is an exhibition for artists and art aficionados.