Brisbane show set to challenge
ART exhibitions can be mindblowing experiences.
Acting as vehicles that translate the artist’s intentions, they can, through those intentions, offer a thought-provoking platform of profound significance.
They can challenge our complacencies, mock pretensions, help us to confront our doubts, concerns, and even our belief and value systems.
The Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane has just opened a remarkable, beautiful, spiritual, and philosophically memorable exhibition.
The Soul Trembles is a survey exhibition mapping 25 years of practice by Berlinbased Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota.
The atmospheric detail, and the introduction of contexts shaped by layers of content and meaning, find resonance with the literature of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
Huge installations of woven thread in predominantly red, black, and white draw labyrinths in space.
They chart the complexities that weave the web of human relationships, they suggest a perilous net that links earth to heaven while reconnoitring the journey between life and death.
Shiota explores “presence within absence”, yet when looking at these immense convolutions of delicate but robust thread, we become equally aware of the absences clasped in the constructed frameworks.
A burnt piano is associated with a childhood memory, the artist’s fight against cancer, an uncertain journey, is etched in skeins of red thread spewing from boats made of wire mesh.
An allusion to immigration, voyages, and a holdall of memories is manifest in a swarm of suitcases hovering in space and steadied by cords.
A more solid installation is Inside – Outside – consisting of a wall of windows collected from construction sites in what was formerly East Berlin.
The window is a two-way device separating the outside from the inside, reality from illusion but with no guarantee of safety for either side.
The exhibition’s didactic panels are informative, containing personal quotes by the artist that are emotive and philosophical.
Also included are drawings, paintings, small sculptures, and a series of photographs showing numerous set and theatre designs created by Shiota.
Particularly appealing are comments by a group of German children talking about their perception of the soul.
This must-see exhibition continues until October 3.
The Crows Nest Gallery is hosting Souvenirs from Eurasia – a video installation by Ben Tupas.
The manipulated imagery explores tourism and cultural identity using a set of carved shell souvenirs as a point of entry to the work.
The details in the scenes are diffused, anonymous.
The sound-grabs too are muted eliciting fleeting memories, gone before total recall.
The ubiquitous blue and red plaid carry bags render the exotic ordinary, almost familiar.
Recollections of the reality of “being there” become blunted while the aides memoire, the postcards and souvenirs purchased in the marketplace assume a greater importance.
The mass-produced tourist trinkets become symbols of the lived experience.
It is they that trigger memory by association.