art review: Contemporary Australia: Women

The risk of many large-scale exhibitions is that without a discernible narrative for the artistically naïve general public (including me) to follow, each piece seems unrelated to the others and you find yourself stumbling from abstract photography to giant nylon installations in the same room. The whole experience can be rather dizzying and overwhelming to the viewer, forcing them to make a premature exit to the gallery café for a pick-me up and the more palatable art miniatures in the gift shop.

‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ is currently showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane, Queensland and features more than 70 works by 56 female Australian artists.

Despite the vague theme, the show was surprisingly coherent. Even more unexpected was the joy, colour and playfulness that linked the majority of works.

Hiromi Tango’s X Chromosome punctures the vast steeliness of GOMA’s foyer with its double helix tree made of shoes, wool, birthday cards, origami, wire and crocheted blankets stretching to the roof in an almost grotesquely abundant display of childlike imagination and memory. The roots of the tower form a sanctum lined with donated memorabilia and carry an overwhelming scent of powdery, flesh coloured musk sticks. This is unrestrained and joyous child’s play.

The emphasis on colour is carried throughout the exhibition. Rebecca Baumann’s Mixed Feelings suspends a printer from the ceiling which ejects two pieces of coloured paper each minute to fall in disordered piles to the floor. The result is not dissimilar to that of a preschool floor after craft hour and yet, inexplicably, it feels disrespectful to step on the scraps. Colour finds form and precision in the traditional paintings by the Amata painters from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in north-west South Australia. Women, mothers and daughters collaborated to depict ancient stories—from seven sisters escaping from abuse into the night to form the Pleiades constellation to the concerns of caring for the young shared by women and animals.

Natalya Hughes pays tribute to Judy Chicago’s feminist work The Dinner Party in The After Party. A room is covered in purple and green wallpaper depicting eggs, palm trees sprouting from taco shells, fighting beavers and dismembered legs arranged in parodic astrological symbols. A pustular, over-upholstered baroque dining room table stands in the centre, reflected in the mirrors that form the roof of this decadent room of garish excess. Similarly absurd is Together, a mother-daughter performance collaboration by Anastasia Klose and Elizabeth Presa in which the women do a coordinated dance to Olivia Newton John’s ‘Magic’ in a Melbourne shopping centre. The banner they carry reads ‘Mother and daughter experiencing the totality of existence’.

Despite many of the pieces using materials and art forms typically denigrated as ‘homely’ and central only to ‘women’s work’, the artists reclaim and celebrate these aspects of womanhood and femininity. In some cases, the artist even hijacks traditional male art forms, as in Deborah Kelly’s The Miracles. Kelly pokes fun at the beatification of children in Renaissance paintings by depicting the modern miracle conceptions of families who used Assisted Reproductive Technology, such as IVF.

Kate Mitchell, self-professed ‘pop-culture bandit’ takes up this transgressive energy in the projection Being Punctual. Each night, a corner of GOMA is lit up by a video of Mitchell running to leap and swing on a chandelier. The youthful fun and silliness of Mitchell’s performance injects life into the sleepy corner of Brisbane’s river, much as GOMA does to the city as a whole. From coloured smoke plumes emitted at the entrance to the gallery, to a six metre tall curtain of golden tinsel slithering in the wind, ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’s exploration of Australian womanhood finds us overwhelmingly joyful and hopeful—a fact indeed worth celebrating.

By Rebekah Oldfield

Image Credit

‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ is exhibiting until 22 July 2012. Admission is free.