Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut Exhibition: the belated edition
Fans and followers, it’s been four weeks since my last post. Please forgive me for my absence; my brain has been heavily occupied by other pursuits. I am prepared to take any punishment and make any penance you deem necessary.
Meanwhile, OMG, I’ve got so many things to tell you about! Where to begin?
Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut exhibition
One unusually warm, perfect, spring Saturday a number of weeks ago now I popped into the IMA for a spot of the Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut exhibition.
I’d been recommending this one to you for a while, which is not something I usually do when I haven’t experienced it for myself. I guess I’ll do anything to promote local emerging artists. Also, I knew it would be good.
The Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut exhibition is an annual occurrence, exhibiting artists who have been lucky enough to score themselves the $5000 grant that Brisbane Airport offers through its collaboration with the IMA. Along with the grant, winners of the Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut experience also gain the opportunity to exhibit at the IMA.
This is not something to be sneezed at.
This year’s winners were Sally Golding, Kelly Hussey-Smith, Fiona Mail and Elizabeth Willing. FYI, I got to visit the exhibition with Hussey-Smith’s brother and was therefore privy to a bit of biographical background info. This also came in handy when I found myself rather alarmed that only three of the four winning artists’ work was on display. Never fear, I secured the backstory: the fourth artist, Fiona Mail, used her $5000 to take fencing lessons. The fruits of these lessons were exhibited as a performance art piece on the opening night. Ah, right! Of course.
So… can I please have $5000?
I thought there might be more to this amusing anecdote than met the proverbial eye, and I was right. ‘Fiona Mail’ is actually a pseudonym for an artist-duo comprised of Kate Woodcroft and Catherine Sagin. At the opening of the Fresh Cut exhibition, they engaged in a duel (a duel??), the winner of which would take naming rights for the work of ‘Fiona Mail’ for a twelve month period following the exhibition. Sagin prevailed on the night, so, watch out for that name.
Of the exhibiting artists…
Elizabeth Willing explored the visual imagery associated with sweets. She decked out an entire wall with Pfeffernüsse biscuits (which, by the time I got to them, had been largely picked off the wall by peckish passers by so that the white-icing-on-white-wall had given way to dark-brown-biscuit-stubs-on-white-wall: very aesthetically pleasing). There was also an entire wall of lolly-imagery wallpaper, a video of Willing making her way (hands-free) through a transparent sheet of toffee, and a very clever sensor-activated, noisy concrete-mixer filled with icing sugar. Loved. It.
Kelly Hussey-Smith presented a range of large-print photographs of animals in zoos around the world, with South-East Asian zoos weighing quite heavily into the mix. The images themselves were extremely beautiful and well composed. They gave the appearance of being objective, even official, zoological photographs, and yet they were in general quite flattering of their subjects. For some of the animals portrayed in the images, however, even the most flattering of photography could not portray a ‘pleasing’ image. A lot of them were in artificial surroundings that made minimal effort to mimic their natural habitat. Alongside each image, Hussey-Smith provided information about the expected lifespan of that animal in the wild and in captivity. Hussey-Smith is described by some as coming from an ‘activist-photography’ tradition, meaning that her work is intended to incite some kind of desire for active change in its viewers.
You can check out more of Hussey-Smith’s images on her website.
Sally Golding delivered a mixed media installation (sometimes referred to as ‘expanded cinema’) comprised of a large, dark, spacious room, two full (human)-length mirrors, erratic lighting, creepy noises and projected images of dead people. The aforementioned were set up so that when circling the back-to-back mirrors in the middle of the room, the viewer found themselves looking at one of two images of dead bodies. They would then be startled by the sudden and surprising disappearance of the reflected image, and the rather confronting reflection of a slightly eerier version of themselves.
And it was rather confronting.
I found myself with an inexplicable urge to flee. It reminded me of that feeling you get when you’re in the house in the dark in the middle of the night, and you suddenly are filled with terror and feel the need to run and fling yourself on your bed without getting your feet too close to the bed in case a big, hairy clawed hand in the manner of Where the Wild Things Are reaches out and grabs you by the ankles.
Or is that just me.
Golding’s work harked back to the Victorian tradition of photographing ill, dying and dead family members, displaying these images as momentos and keeping them as family heirlooms. Photographing the dead seems like a bizarre and rather morbid tradition to a contemporary western audience, which I think adds to the impact behind this piece.
All in all it was a delightful exhibition and I am truly sorry that I didn’t get this up in time for you to feel coerced into going and seeing it for yourselves. The good news is that my money is on these artists being around for quite a while, so with any luck you’ll have a chance to see them again, somewhere, soon.
