“In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity …
This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behavior, are growing, on average, more and more transient. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality.”
Alvin Toffler, “Chapter 8: Information: The Kinetic Image”, Future Shock, 1970
This archive is an attempt to preserve a selection of my contributions to the visual arts against the pace of information.
As if holding a handful of pebbles collected from the shore, protected, however briefly, from the waves of time.
Curatorial 2023—2012
This section archives a selection of my projects at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, ranging from focused thematic collection displays to extraordinarily ambitious solo exhibitions by leading contemporary Australian artists.
Assembling more than 90 works created over 25 years, The Favourite was Michael Zavros’s first museum survey.
Known for his extraordinary technical prowess, his affinity for fashion and luxury, his interest in appearances and his passion for his Greek Cypriot heritage, Zavros’s idealised imagery has developed alongside—if not become entwined with—Australia’s pronounced turn towards conspicuous consumption and aspirational individualism.
Courage and Beauty was the second major exhibition at GOMA to recognise the immense generosity of benefactor James C. Sourris AM. Organised across three thematic strands—Transcendental, Symbolic and Elemental—the exhibition reflected Sourris’s support both for artists willing to make challenging work and for those pursuing beauty through abstraction and experimentation.
Vernon Ah Kee, Howard Arkley, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett, Vivienne Binns, Leonard Brown, Mike Brown, Eugene Carchesio, Jon Cattapan, Peter Cripps, Bonita Ely, James Fardoulys, d harding, Robert Hunter, Michael Johnson, Tim Johnson, Peter Kennedy, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Nigel Lendon, Ross Manning, Lyndall Milani, Albert Namatjira, Yukultji Napangati, Claude Pannka, Otto Pareroultja, John Peart, Rosslynd Piggott, Luke Roberts, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Udo Sellbach, Arryn Snowball, Madonna Staunton, Rover Thomas, Dick Watkins, Judy Watson, Normana Wight
Seen by more than 250,000 visitors and occupying GOMA’s entire ground floor, Curious Affection was Patricia Piccinini’s most ambitious institutional exhibition at the time. It brought together a concise survey of 20 years of practice and a major suite of immersive, multisensory installations.
Known for her imaginative yet strangely familiar lifelike hybrid creatures, Piccinini invites audiences to consider their agency in a world where advances in biotechnology and digital technologies challenge the boundaries of humanity.
Mapping Australia through idiosyncratic subjects such as public swimming pools, butterflies and dangerous animals, Noel McKenna’s 15-year Map painting project was presented as a complete series for the first time in Landscape—Mapped.
Filled with wit and sincerity, the works respond to the apparent redundancy of physical maps in our connected era. They also suggest that while the whole may be more than the sum of its parts, it remains, to a point, the sum of its parts.
Travellers assembled an eclectic group of works reflecting on the many motives, motions and conditions of travel through images of discovery, exile, pilgrimage, reflection, sustenance, trade and exchange. Together, the works raise questions of independence and limitation; the mutability of identity; the potent experience of encounter; and the passage of time.
Khadim Ali, Dadang Christanto, Hamish Fulton, Guan Wei, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Takahashi Hiroaki, Emily Jacir, Craig Koomeeta, Elwyn Lynn, Wanyubi Marika, Danie Mellor, Liam O’Brien, Qiu Zhijie, Tom Roberts, Jan Senbergs, Jeffrey Smart, J.M.W. Turner, Tintin Wulia, Maker once known Qijia culture, Maker once known Shanxi-Longshan culture, Maker once known Yangshao culture
Assembled and presented during Staunton’s lifetime, Out of a Clear Blue Sky was a five-decade survey of her paintings. Moving from her earliest colour-field abstractions of the 1960s through her collages and painted assemblages, the exhibition concluded with a group of eloquent figurative images. These late representational works reveal an artist at the height of her powers, bristling with the weighty insights that can accompany age and deep reflection.
Voice and Reason was a collection exhibition developed to complement the major survey of contemporary Indigenous art My Country: I Still Call Australia Home. The project explored visual intersections and overlaps—along with imitations, appropriations and coincidences—between the work of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and settler artists.
The premise drew on philosopher Arthur Danto’s notion that different artists could make the same gesture yet intend different meanings. It underscored the ways meaning shifts across contexts and the limits of determining what an artwork means simply by looking at it.
Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Michael Boiyool Anning, Judy Baypungala, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett, Gordon Bennett and Eugene Carchesio, Nola Campbell, John Citizen, Robert Ambrose Cole, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Pulpurru Davies, Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Sue Elliott, Fiona Foley, Mary Gibson, Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles, Marla Guppy and Alice Hinton Bateup, Desley Henry, Jarinyanu David Downs, Tim Johnson, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Robert MacPherson, Daniel Marquis, Danie Mellor, Sally Morgan, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Abe Muriata, Tjungkiya Wukula (Linda Syddick) Napaltjarri, Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, Ann Newmarch, Joe Ngallametta, Lin Onus, Mike Parr, Margaret Preston, Luke Roberts, Joe Rootsey, Dick Roughsey, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Nicholas Wallace, Ngipi Ward, Judy Watson, Pedro Wonaeamirri, Maker once known Port Keats (Wadeye) Community
Social Networking explored the many ways artists approach social contact and the social contract. Addressing historical injustice, human rights, sustainability and cultural exchange, the works considered how individuals shape—and are shaped by—their cultural contexts.
Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Pat Hoffie, Sutee Kunavichayanont, Jompet Kuswidananto, James Newitt, Raquel Ormella, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Patricia Piccinini, Stuart Ringholt, Darren Siwes, Michel Tuffery, You Are Here, Zhang Huan
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