Renata Buziak Unfolding Rhythms. “Renata Buziak has been testing the limits of the photographic print by exploring the aesthetic tension that has always existed between the photogram and photograph and more dramatically by complimenting sensitometry with biochemistry. Buziak has taken the chemistry of the traditional darkroom into the backyard garden in Brisbane, scrub of Minjerribah or the fields outside her original hometown of Janow Lubelski in Poland, to develop a “photographic” process in which the organic decomposition of plant on c-type photographic paper is transformed through digital…” © Ross Woodrow all rights reserved April 2014.
Dr Laini Burton FASST 2016: “Motivated by the question: How might we ‘fashion’ our bodies in the future? this paper will reflect on a range of examples from cosmetic surgery and extreme body modification, scientific breakthroughs such as the successful bio-fabrication of human flesh, through to the design of wearable organs hosting synthetic life. In taking this discursive approach, we are urged to consider the ethical, material and aesthetic aspects of (re)designing ourselves and arriving at the possibility of configuring a relational economy with synthetic life toward an unfixed, evolving politics of species-being.” © Laini Burton all rights reserved 2016.
Rex Butler (A.D.S Donaldson) I Am, You Are, We Are Australia. “Art historians for some time have tried to define what “Australian” art is. Their definitions have inevitably been exclusive, often leaving out, for example, Australian artists working overseas and artists from overseas working here. But what would it mean to say that “Australian” art can be made by anyone, anywhere? We try to answer this question by looking at a series of European artists who have painted gumtrees and a series of European and American artists who have made works called Australia and even “Aboriginal” art”. © Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson all rights reserved.
Dr Courtney Pedersen FASST 2016: “While we often think of body modification and a ‘posthuman’ condition as being contemporary phenomena, we can look to the avant-garde art and design of the early twentieth century as predictors of many of our current concerns. In both art and fashion, there was a keen interest in redesigning the body itself as a response to technological and social change. In this talk we are invited to consider the provocations that these practitioners raised and how many of their concerns are still relevant”.
Kellie O’Dempsey: Artist + Curator of the performance art event ”Under Arena.” Opening the Drawing International Brisbane Symposium 2015, “Under Arena” was an initiative of the Griffith Centre For Creative Arts Research. Auspiced by Griffith University, Queensland College of Art through the assistance of The National Trust and Brisbane City Council, “Under Arena” was representative of the artistic interdisciplinary dialects involved in the creation of a lexicon of contemporary performative practise.
Chris Worfold, Hot Summer Nights, ShowArts, Brisbane, 2022. An exhibition in three iterations, Hot Summer Nights 2022, ShowArts Brisbane, was in direct response to the artist’s PHD, “Facture, Fold and the Image-Screen: The Effect of Digital Imaging on the Production of Analogue Painting” published by Creative Works, Queensland University of Technology, 2021. It Is – Philip Guston, Spring 1958 – “Painting permits, ultimately, the joys of the possible, but the narrow passage to this domain…” © Chris Worfold all rights reserved.
Flatline (Todd Fuller + Carl Sciberras): Under Arena opened the Drawing International Brisbane Symposium 2015 and was an initiative of the Griffith Centre For Creative Arts Research. “What we are dealing with here is the interior/exterior nexus of line, point, space, shape and contour and how these basic actions can be interrogated and reconciled between the medium’s of dance and drawing in arriving at a hybridised intellectual…
Carolyn Mackenzie-Craig: Gambit Lines. Bosz Gallery July 2016. “Living in the subject body means living within certain parameters. Our body-minds are restricted by learned behaviour, both intentional and unintentional, due to the influence of cultural normativity. Through the white noise of culture’s codifications, we forget that we exist in a naturally fluid space with potential to be explored”. © Marisa Georgiou.
Dr William Platz: Life Drawing, Yawning Zombies and The Dragan Ilic Affair. This paper ruminates over a few research projects as part of a longstanding inquiry into contemporary life drawing and the transactions that occur between artists and models. It draws upon recent studio practice and an investigation of Human Canvas — a 1979 performance by artist Dragan Ilic. © William Platz all rights reserved.
Robert Andrew: Recalibrating Country. “My original intention of involving myself with the department of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art (CAIA) situated at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, was to primarily undertake family research. Initially the art practice was of a secondary importance to me. However it didn’t take long for me to realise the heightened levels of satisfaction I gained from the processes of researching and expressing that research in ways that I’d never before considered.” © Robert Andrew 2016.
Professor Susan Best: Reparative Aesthetics Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. “This talk offers a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art. It examines the work of four women photographers from the southern hemisphere who are pioneering a reparative approach to art about shameful histories such as: the harsh and unjust treatment of indigenous peoples; the cruel institutionalisation of vulnerable groups; the disappearance of dissidents; and the carnage of civil war”. © Susan Best all rights reserved.
Zoe Porter: Under Arena. Taking place on the 30 September 2015 at the historic Spring Hill Reservoir, Under Arena was an initiative of the Griffith Centre For Creative Arts Research. Auspiced by Griffith University, through the assistance of The National Trust and Brisbane City Council and was representative of the artistic interdisciplinary dialects involved in the creation of a lexicon of contemporary performative practise. This conveyance is a subjectively inflected inference of the artistic intent of Zoe Porter, Ben Ely, Marianna Joslin and Mayu Moto.
Franz Ehmann, Many Things (it’s a colourful world): “…essentially it is colourful and a world in which many things are going in different directions…In a way throughout my practise there exists a stimulus that comes from the sixties art movement minimalism…and while things are reduced to certain materials as i use them…putting them simply into geometric patterns or very strict boxes cubes etc…i still acknowledge the hand made aspect and or the fabrication through machines…”
Rex Butler, Ben Quilty The Fog of War: “Why are certain art works popular? Because they express something of our attitudes towards things, and thus tell us something about ourselves. There is nothing more popular in this year of the centenary of Gallipoli than Ben Quilty’s images of soldiers who have served in Afghanistan, After Afghanistan. But what – if we look at them closely – do they have to tell us about contemporary attitudes towards war?” © Rex Butler all rights reserved.
Gary Carsley Sciencefictive: “The superabundance of conceptual questions that one is met with when viewing the complex series of surfaces that constitute Carsley’s most recent exhibition seamlessly revolves around an artistic inference, circle the believability of this metaphoric significance that exists between, within and throughout the artistic object, time, space, place and of course the viewer in situ. What we are challenged with are a profusion of conceptual slippages between illusion and reality”.
Chris Worfold: White Canvas Gallery October 2015. “An embracing of the known and unknown, this exhibition doesn’t inhabit a pre-ordained theoretical trajectory. I’m not making these paintings to establish a postmodern or indeed a meta-modern position as a marker of where we are placed within a linear understanding of history or my leanings as a socio-political individual. You could say that all of this is inherent in the medium of painting and through direct association, in my privilege as being a painter”.
Simon Degroot, Indirect Response: a Synthesis of Abstract Constructs. “Simon Degroot’s research interest focuses on the translation of formal elements in contemporary abstraction, tracing how and when shapes become reused, and from where they are sourced. To be able to investigate this he references the ‘languages of art’; he must understand the logic of aesthetics and in order, apply this process of translation into contemporary abstraction. These recent works articulate this fluency…” © Cameron Hope.
Nic Plowman, The Sensation of Logic: “…being known more for delicate watercolours than lusty oils and acrylics, Nic Plowman’s Popes, Kings and Other Fools exhibition at Anthea Polson Art marks a turn in his career. Where Plowman’s two previous shows were self-referential in reflecting his serious health issues and near-death experience, his new work examines the unparalleled status of religious figures in Christian art. Plowman explains the impetus for this exhibition as being…” © Jane Denison all rights reserved.
Benjamin Werner, Blinded By the Lights, “The nighttime setting of Werner’s works sees globes of light pulse across the surface, but the rest of suburbia remains unseen, rendered as a deep bluish black of possibilities. The dark depths of the canvases make the suburban glamorous – gone is the urban grit of frequented streets, mismatched paint jobs and quirky garden elements. Any scenes of pain, hopelessness or debauchery are swallowed by the night…” © Simone Oriti all rights reserved.
Carolyn V Watson, Survivor Maths, “Carolyn V Watson is part of a wave of artists that are reviving “old fashioned” art making practices. Integral to Watson and other artists working in this marginal way (think Lae Oldman, Juz Kitson and Lindsay Pichaske), is the wholehearted commitment of the artist being immersed in each stage of their art. Embracing the physicality involved in the act of making, these artists privilege the handmade over the technical, the humble over the…” © Jane Denison all rights reserved.
Celeste Chandler, The Embarrassment of Sincerity, “A fearless and at times brutal re-imagining of the act of contemporary figurative painting, the artwork of Celeste Chandler unmistakably engages with the development of a new set of strategic maneuvers in her reconfiguration of a visual lexicon with which to communicate ideas. What we very quickly ascertain when viewing Chandler’s oeuvre is the patent unverifiability of the underlying sentiments of production..” © Simon Marsh all rights reserved.