Colliding Worlds bring art alumni together
by Katrina Kalleske
The collision of competing values within society and the collision of natural environments with human influences are just two themes depicted by artists in the Colliding Worlds exhibition at UniSA’s Samstag Museum.
And among the artists featured in the exhibition are several UniSA graduates.
"Clearly in our present circumstances of globally threatened ecologies and climatic disruption, the Colliding Worlds concept is appropriate," Samstag Museum Director Erica Green says.
"Today, wherever you turn there is upheaval in human society, not the least being worldwide economic meltdown."
The Colliding Worlds exhibition features works by graduates Shaun Kirby, Nicholas Folland and Anna Platten.
"The six artists invited to exhibit each produce art that in some aspect, either resonates or engages with ideas of social, cultural, or environmental responsibility, or else communicates the uncertainty, challenge and strangeness of a colliding world moment in time," Green said.
"The work of some of the Colliding Worlds artists may seem inscrutable, bizarre and even sometimes alienating or offensive. But with the benefit of hindsight, we often revere work that opens new space and new ways of looking, or work that truthfully shows us society’s underbelly, with its flaws, fears and possibilities."
The work of Adelaide-based Nicholas Folland for the
Colliding
Worlds exhibition picks up the theme of exploration, in this case,
19th century and early 20th century exploration of the Antarctic.
His installation features a landscape of luminous ice-peaks,
constructed from domestic glass and crystal crockery.
"Much of my work either includes or implies a transformation taking place," Folland said. "Hopefully there’s a sense that something has just happened, or that it is about to, like a moment of realisation, it’s out of your control."
Folland, a 1999 graduate of a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours, has been doing some exploring of his own in recent years. He has continued to study at the Peit Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the University of Barcelona and the University of Sydney. He has also been exhibiting continually throughout Australia. He says his colleagues and teachers at UniSA have certainly contributed to his success.
"I was fortunate to work with some really amazing artists and staff at UniSA and they pushed me to work rigorously at my profession and to fully understand the arts industry," he sys.
"They taught me to be ambitious and to take risks in order to be in control of my career. I also went through the school with a really dedicated group of students who continue to motivate and inspire me."
Shaun Kirby, manager of the Melbourne branch of artistic company
Thylacine and a 1984 graduate from UniSA with a major in sculpture,
is another artist featured in the Colliding Worlds exhibition.
His mixed media piece of work features a bright white table with a giant spider lurking underneath. Kirby says he made the cousin beast piece at a time in Australia when there was a flood of politically motivated rhetoric about notions of Australian-ness and Australian values.
"The work was a response not only to the politics of the time but continues a long-term fascination with the connections between the individual psyche and the less visible cultural, political and historical forces that act on it," he said.
"I think of cousin beast as an image of what you might call the cultural imagining, that is, an object that might reflect current real world events but is more about the complex interaction between external events, our own cultural and historical experience, and our individual psychic landscape."
Meanwhile, Anna Platten’s work for the Colliding Worlds
exhibition is an oil painting on linen featuring a woman in a period
costume, riding a hobbyhorse.
"To me the figure, although female and young, stands for anyone reflecting on the experience of passing through life, reflecting on one’s interaction with the world within and the world without," Platten said.
Platten specialises in oil paintings and also works on charcoal drawings. Since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting and print making in the early 1980s, she has been busy painting and working as a teacher for the Adelaide Central School of Arts.
The Colliding Worlds exhibition also features Hayden Fowler, Pia Borg and Patricia Piccinini. It runs from May 15 to July 24 at the Samstag Museum, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide.