Nici Cumpston, Winter III, Nookamka-Lake, 2012, 75x205
Including work by
Noel McKenna - Jason Benjamin - Christian Thompson - Marian Drew - Catherine Nelson - Freddie Timms - Nathan Taylor - Rex Dupain - Chris Pease - Nici Cumpston - Joseph McGlennon
For more than two hundred and twenty-five years the Western view of the Australian landscape has seesawed between a fertile utopia of great promise and a scary, rugged land with a ruthlessly unforgiving interior. Australia’s indigenous people have seen their country in a parallel - and altogether more pragmatic - light as a place to traverse and from which to gather food; a world to be accepted just as it is, thrown into being by Ancestors.
Jason-Benjamin Leichhardt, Healing, 2013, 120x120
Without doubt all these widespread attributes - from the ideological to the practical - can be drawn from the Australian landscape. But what distinguishes our current reading from those of previous eras is that today no one single interpretation prevails.
Australia is an enormous land, still relatively isolated and with the majority of its population based in the urban centres that hug the coastline. Our visual past has reflected the dominant opinion of each age - the colonial administration promulgating free settler propaganda; pastoralists and miners giving thanks for a land that continues to give; and, more recently, the 20th century homage to sun, sea and surf. But today collective opinion no longer directs our view of the land or the art that it inspires.
Chris Pease, Noble Savage 2 (Rejecting-Citizenship), 2013, 100x65
The Australian landscape of Now manifests itself in a matrix of ways, through the eyes of many artists reading their landscape, in their own way, just for them. It´s a personal thing.
2 September to 30 September 2013
Neben dieser Ausstellung laden wir herzlich zu Open Street Ackerstrasse am 7. September ein.
