BANK Art Museum Moree will open a suite of exhibits on Friday, April 24 featuring the works of six well-known artists.
The exhibition will run until May 30 and includes works by Jo Norton, Penny Evans, Joan Ross, Melissa Spratt, Aaron Butt and Pip Stalley.
The exhibit also features the Bleakley Collection – objects and artworks that are part of BAMM’s collection.
Curated by Robert Bleakley during his tenure as Head of Tribal Art at Sotheby’s in the 1970s, the objects offer a rare opportunity to engage with the material culture of First Nations communities from across Australia.
Comprising carved tools, ceremonial objects and early examples of cultural exchange, many of the objects were originally taken to Britain by colonial travellers as ‘souvenirs’.
The exhibition invites critical reflection on histories of collection, displacement and the enduring cultural knowledge embodied in each object.
Fire as Author by Jo Norton is a body of work that comes together through two approaches: one developed within her emerging wood firing practice, and the other through alternative firing techniques.
Together, these works tell a shared story through surface, process and material. Both bodies of work are co-authored by fire.
Operating at different scales and tempos, fire asserts its agency not simply as a tool, but as an active participant whose actions – erasure, marking and transformation – convert material processes into records of memory.
Let’s party like it’s 1815 by Joan Ross is a digital artwork that colourfully critiques the legacy of the colonisation of Australia.
The fantastic eight-minute animation unfolds wittily as a tableau of greed. The ultimate separation from nature: self-interest, lack of care, possession, ownership, mansions, silverware, violent festivities toasting over ‘their land’; blow flies, bees and much, much more.
All of the trappings of a culture of overconsumption spinning around and finally returning to the Earth.
Sensitised and Sentimental by Melissa Spratt, a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), uses finger-knitted wool, a fibre that can both soothe and irritate, to elucidate the experience of being an HSP.
In bold capitals and high-value colours, Spratt shares short statements and longer, stream of consciousness-style phrases conveying the flood of emotions and thoughts she endures as an HSP. (HSP is a trait identified in 1996 by psychologist Elaine Aron. HSPs experience extraordinary bodily and emotional responses to a variety of emotional and sensory stimuli).
Near Enough (Is Good Enough) IV by Aaron Butt is a painterly exhibition exploring Australian photographer Frank Hurley’s images of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917, seeking to critique the colonial and patriarchal goals of the expedition and its negative effects on the environment.
Frank Hurley captured hundreds of images of the expedition, a great deal of which reside in the State Library of New South Wales collection.
Many images were taken using a new method of colour photography called the ‘Paget’ process, and numerous photographs now have unintentional and non-indexical colourations, which Butt has used as inspiration to play with various painting techniques, pigments and substrates.
Enduring Ground by Pip Stalley, an exhibition in BAMM’s Stairwell Gallery program, is a cohesive body of work developed from sustained observation of grazing land in Western New South Wales.
Using restrained abstraction and natural earth pigments, the works explore landscape as surface, structure and atmosphere.
BAMM Exhibition
When: April 24 to May 30
Where: BAMM Gallery
