The Artist’s Choice series at the Queensland Art Gallery invites respected artists to select works from the Gallery’s collection and reassemble them in exhibitions that create new situations, new dimensions, and new conversations. Buoyancy is the Artist’s Choice exhibition by Brisbane-based photographer Marian Drew, who has chosen works with a strong emphasis on water, fluidity, and the sea.
‘Water provides a place to meditate, to be in the moment, both physically and spiritually’ writes Drew of the exhibition, which is itself a ‘delicate balance between transition and suspension’.
The ‘delicate balance’ that Marian has injected into the exhibition sees a combination of digital media, installation pieces, porcelain vessels, Indigenous art, contemporary Australian art, and colonial-Australian art displayed side by side.
The Indigenous art includes Anniebell Marrngamarrnga’s woven Yawk Yawk (female water spirit) Pregnant with Twins (2007), a work that conveys the Indigenous belief that certain waterholes are spiritual places and the women who swim in them will become pregnant with twins or triplets. Also included is Jill Barker’s Faultlines (1996), a fantastically large ink on paper work that cascades from the gallery wall like a rush of blue water; and Gabriel Orozco’s Double Tail (2003), a sculptural work suspended from the ceiling like the bleached bones of a prehistoric whale.
Drew has dedicated an entire wall to a cluster of gilded-frame seascapes from the 17th to 19th centuries, which individually, especially Isaac Walter Jenner’s Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador (1893), are striking when presented in singular glory, yet appear to merge and fuse into each other in a collective blend of ocean and coastline. This is not without intention, however, as to the right of the works stands the single black sheep of the collection – Bill Henson’s Untitled (1995), a large print depicting a dark and strangely ominous seascape that balances the lightness of its companion works, and shows that the beauty and tranquillity of water is only a façade beneath which its true strength and power lies.
Artist’s Choice: Marian Drew, Buoyancy
Queensland Art Gallery
July 1 – October 16
Full Caption Details: Sigmar Polke, Germany b.1941
Venusian enemy who went from high society to marry a prince; The Jersey Royal (detail) 2000
Synthetic polymer paint and Indian ink
Diptych: left panel: 198 x 148.5cm; right panel: 200 x 148.8cm
Purchased 2003. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
