As Lemonade stretches into its third season of Grad Show reviews, I was invited to co-judge the Industry Award — Best in Show — Visual Arts with Onespace’s Jodie Cox.
QCAD’s pairing of a Commercial Gallerist with a strong eye for public art and training in sculpture (Cox) with an art historian turned art critic (me) made for a thoroughly productive experience as we traversed QCAD’s sprawling and quiet day-before-opening Grad Show. Aligned in much of our thinking, Cox nevertheless drew my attention to material finishes and the stages of undergraduate experimentation with media while I, unsurprisingly, often experienced and understood artworks through their relationships with the ideas, aesthetics, and experimentations of other artists. Combining these perspectives, we agreed on the overall calibre, exciting experimentation, and excellent installation of this year’s graduating cohort. Congratulations to all.
The following extends my judges notes, with thanks to Cox for her insights. Any errors or limitations are my own.
Thematically, this year’s cohort softened and in turn strengthened their engagements with identity politics. They continued to find inspiration in the self and the domestic, collisions of high and low visual imagery (especially online imagery), and artistic referents from the distant past. Figuration trumped abstraction, narrative trumped conceptual endeavours, and everything and everyone was elevated by movement off the wall into 3-dimensional space as well as well curated hangs. Jennifer Evans, Vicky Satchwell, Elsie Salkeld, and Spot Willows, among many of their peers, set themselves apart through their use of space.
Twinned highlights of the exhibition, both awarded Best in Show for visually distinct presentations, were expanded practice student Rosemary Tamas-Cao and painter Jorge Mariño Brito.
Tamas-Cao’s ee with ellow owers (2024), constructed a house-like domicile within the cavernous shed that is QCAD’s sculpture studios. Against that industrious locale, Tamas-Cao’s structure was delicate, translucent, and paper thin; its roof and two sides missing; its walls stopping a foot short of the ground; culminating in heightened sensations of construction, perambulation, looking in, and ephemerality. To draw a sustained gaze, Tamas Cao embellished this rectangular form with poetry spun from hair and makeshift drains littered with the flora-like dried skins of onions. As we walked around its border, Tamas-Cao dressed in understated light-grey, moved with quiet precision, relocating grains of rice from here to there, onion skins from another there to another here. Reflecting on an experience of temporary accommodation during heavy rains, ee with ellow owers expanded a personal memory into artistic engagements with home, shelter, food, family, memory, nostalgia, architecture, social relations, weather, the environment and climate change as well as sculpture, installation, poetry and performance. With this heady mix of themes and media resolved into one cohesive work, Tamas-Cao’s practice lends itself to experimental and emerging art scenes and I look forward to seeing what and where she exhibits next.
Before turning to Mariño Brito, four further works in the Sculpture Studios benefitted from one another’s company and continue as highlights in my mind. All used unusual and found materials, all operated in shared earthy tones, and all were sensitively installed in relation to the studio and each other. These were works by Patricia Olazo, Paula Condon, Deb Lansdown and Stella Maimoana. Briefly: Olazo paired tall wooden sculptures, each roughly and iteratively carved away, with five vertical chemigrams, their warm blacks, purples, and silvers mingling and dripping in enchanting ways. Borrowing from Arte Povera, Condon carefully collected, cast, constructed and compiled objects with relationships to home. I was especially taken with the faint smell of beeswax and the subtle ways Condon positioned elements of her work to blend in with and extend out from architectural features of the space. Lansdown mesmerised with three large installations in golden hues, each attracting and reimagining the sun. I anticipate Lansdown will keep experimenting in this vein to great affect. And Maimoana astutely combined the visual languages of the office (the filing cabinet, that place of Western knowledge, taxonomy, and order) with Samoan engraving.
Like Tamas-Cao, Mariño Brito also presented exceptionally refined work yet his painterly practice is more suitable for the commercial gallery scene and it was no surprise to see sale stickers by his work on opening night. I’ve followed Mariño Brito’s development since he was a first year student. I came across his painting in a QCA group show alongside third year peers, noting within that hang both the skill of his developing practice and the savvy indicated by exhibiting with students two years his senior. Two years later, the contours of Mariño Brito’s practice remain the same: figurative; homoerotic; dreamy colours; sensations of intimacy, erasure, and nostalgia; but now the artist has further refined his visual language. These works sit cleverly between the photographic and painterly; they shift between ir/readability; they are scaled up, confident and bold; and they were the undeniable stand out within a huge painting cohort, drawing your eye from a distance. Mariño Brito’s paintings look good in reproduction, but they are even better in person where they can be experienced as a life-size encounter, where eyes are only suggested and yet they seem to connect directly with your gaze, where moving closer brings paint rather than pictorial detail into focus. Mariño Brito confesses he is a lifelong student with a litany of degrees in his past and plans to continue studying in his future. Within or in lieu of this plan, I hope he keeps painting.
Just briefly: four further artists caught my eye.
Brooke Tarrant exhibited endearing painted miniatures, each the translation of a tourist photograph yet imbued with a distant sense of time and place. Her work reminds me of Miranda Hine and brought up the ethical query: can a judge purchase a work of art from the show they are judging? My internal compass said no and I returned to the show on opening night to a full row of red stickers, delighted for the artist and disappointed for myself.
Lucy Milbank’s lakeside gathering is a uniquely unsettling and compelling painting. Like Valezquez’ Las Meninas (1656), Millbank’s composition brings together 11 figures, positioning them solo and in clusters at various depths in the picture plane, their gazes criss-crossing and intersecting with ours.
Amongst photography students, Luna Cat’s Polymorphous Desire projected footage of three intermingled figures by a lake onto the far side of a large hanging cyanotype, the latter capturing three silhouetted bodies in crisp white against a sea of blue. The material layering of bodies and desire recalled Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1964-67), a feminist video of lovemaking from the imaginary perspective of the artist’s cat. I also welcomed Luna Cat’s provision of a chair, where Cox and I paused in our movements across campus to watch, and talk, and think.
Layered imagery also featured in Chelsea Carkeet’s Between Worlds, a short film transporting the artist from Kurilpa Point to on Country. Yet I was even more taken with Carkeet’s small, luminous, and hand-stitched circus tents, alluding to the boxing career of their Uncle Boyd Scully. My grandfather was also a boxer. Thinking of him and the shared paths the two men may have crossed reiterated art’s capacity to revisit history with new perspectives, for intimate objects to focus and carry our thoughts.
Expanded Lemonade coverage of 2024 graduate exhibitions is kindly made possible by Lemonade’s Patreons and Charmaine Lyons. Lemonade is continuing to fundraise for four further reviews. Become a Patreon or contact editor@lemonadeletters.com.au to make a one-off contribution and support this unique coverage of Queensland’s emerging artists.
Louise R Mayhew is an Australian Feminist Art Historian and the Founding Editor of Lemonade.
