GCCAR

Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research

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Call for paper and performance proposals, "The Magic Lantern" Conference September 2018

Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World

An Interdisciplinary Conference

 CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES

 Duration: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - 15:00 - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - 18:00

Location: ANU & National Film and Sound Archive 

Conference Dates: 4-6 September 2018

Affect / Animation / Aparatuses & Technology /  Cinema / Digital Humanities / Entertainment / Evangelism / Exploration / Globalisation & Trade / Heritage Studies Media Archaeology / Performance & Reenactment / Photography / Illusion, Optics & Phantasmagoria / Science Communication / Missionary Histories

From its development in the colonial period, to its echoes in today’s multimedia spaces, the magic lantern, along with its thousands of photographic and hand-painted slides, has had a pervasive and lasting impact on visual culture. Historians are just discovering its powerful presence in entertainment, education, science, religion, politics andadvertising. Galleries, libraries and archives are uncovering untouched caches of slides in their collections. And artists and performers are rekindling the ‘magic’ of the technology.

The Australian Research Council Project, ‘Heritage in the Limelight: the magic lantern in Australia and the world’ is organising this conference in partnership with the National Film and Sound Archive. It will feature keynotes from international researchers, as well as papers and performances from significant Australian scholars and artists.

A call for papers and performances for this event is currently open. We invite 200 word abstracts for papers and performances from colleagues in the GLAM sector, scholars, artists, musicians and performers. The abstracts should respond, even tangentially, to the magic lantern and its associated technologies and practices, in either a historical or contemporary context. Abstract deadline is: 30 March 2018 Please send abstracts to: [email protected] 

Registration details and costs are forthcoming. 

Further information on the website.

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Call for papers, abstracts, artistic responses and performances, "Narratives of Climate Change Symposium"

Narratives of Climate Change Symposium

Call for papers, abstracts, artistic responses and performances

 The University of Newcastle, the Griffith Climate Change Response Program and the School of Law and Justice, Southern Cross University invite you to submit abstracts for the Narratives of Climate Change Symposium.

Symposium Dates: 5-6 July 2018

Location: Newcastle Law School, NeW Space Campus 409 Hunter St, Newcastle NSW Australia

The struggle to solve the problem of human-forced climate change - which requires us to stop using fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas and end deforestation - has become an ever-present backdrop to political discourse, an intermittent topic in popular media, a central concern for community and social movements in the Global South and North, and a magnet for scholarly engagement.

The climate change problem is a disruptive, and potentially creative force that challenges, among other things, diverse ways of living, expectations of a good life, the dominant patterns of production and consumption, dominant frameworks of knowledge and the political, the fundamental precepts of legal systems, and the presupposition that our children’s children will inherit a world in which humans and the greater community of life can flourish.

At the same time, discourses around climate change risk invisibilising other histories of power and exploitation, such as colonialism, that have long inflicted violences upon First Nations peoples and their lifeworlds, and which underpin the reality that both the impacts and root causes of climate change are experienced disproportionally by the most vulnerable. Indeed, some climate change interventions serve to undermine rather than sustain the Earth. 

PRESENTATION OF SCHOLARLY PAPERS

We invite you to submit proposals for oral presentations in the parallel sessions (30 mins including 10 mins discussion) relating to the topics of the Symposium. We invite participants to interpret the topics of the Symposium in the broadest sense. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Narratives of Climate Justice

Narratives of Activism and Climate Change Narratives of Climate Science

Storytelling and Climate Change  

*Participants may submit full papers for publication in a special issue of the Newcastle Law Review by 5.00pm on Friday 18 May 2018.

PRESENTATION OF ARTISTIC RESPONSES AND PERFORMANCES

We also invite you to submit proposals for artistic responses and performances of all kind, including dance, music and multimedia, presented in the context of explaining and accepting that we cannot distance ourselves from the causes and effects of climate change. Artistic responses and performances may be conducted within the parallel sessions or be "inter sessional", according to the nature of the proposal

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT

Deadline: Friday 2 March 2018 at 5pm Format and Style:

Should not exceed 400 words

Times New Roman 11 pt; double spacing 

For scholarly presentations, do not include figures, tables, footnotes, endnotes or other references. For artistic responses and performances, please describe the nature and content with as much detail as possible. Submit your abstract and register at: [email protected]

Registration will open in January 2018 and early-bird registration ends 25 May 2018.

Further information on the website.

Image: Greenland iceberg floating past the village of Narsaq. Photographer Brendan Mackey

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Call for Papers - CFP: ‘Risk Anything!’: Modernist Women between Centre and Periphery' Symposium

‘Risk Anything!’: Modernist Women between Centre and Periphery

A symposium presented by the Australasian Modernist Studies Network

 Friday 6 April 2018

University of New South Wales

 Keynote: A/Prof Natalya Lusty (The University of Sydney)

 “Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”

 The peripatetic New Zealand modernist Katherine Mansfield wrote these words towards the end of her life, urging herself to be courageous, to pursue her creative convictions. Mansfield’s approach to life and work is an example of the countless creative women who embraced, employed and drove the modernist cultural experiment.

 Nearly a century later, our own era is equally defined by contingency and risk, offering a unique opportunity to reflect on the history and legacies of creative behaviour that defines itself in terms of risk. We invite proposals from scholars on topics relating to risk, women and modernist culture, and from female-identifying artists, writers and performers whose practice engages with the legacies of modernist women. We especially welcome contributions focusing on women who have traversed the ‘risky’ division between centres of modernism – Britain, Europe, and the United States – and so-called ‘peripheries’. These may take the form of a 20-minute presentation/10-minute question format or a team-led 90 minute roundtable discussion or workshop format.

 Risk may be interpreted in relation to:

●   Creative experimentation and the avant-garde

●   Cultural and gender norms

●   Sexuality

●   Reputation

●   Failure

●   Personal motivation

●   Finance/business

●   Danger – personal, political, social

●   Political struggle

 Selected papers will be published as a special journal issue.

 Please send 250-word proposals for papers, roundtables or workshops, along with a 50-word bio to [email protected] by 31 January 2018. Responses will be distributed in early February.

 Event organisers: Dr Baylee Brits (UNSW), Dr Louise R Mayhew (Griffith University) & Dr Helen Rydstrand (UNSW).

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Elizabeth Shaw, selected for 'Exhibition in Print - Repair and Renewal'

Elizabeth Shaw's neckpiece, Caged Arm, has been selected by Curator Stuart Kestenbaum for the Society of North American Goldsmith Annual publication Exhibition in Print - Repair and Renewal.

Additionally, Caged Arm is featured in the accompanying exhibition, Exhibition in Print: Repair and Renewal (EiP) Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA, September 8 – November 25, 2017.

EiP showcases outstanding metal artworks by over 20 artists and members of Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG). As an annual feature in Metalsmith magazine with companion exhibition, the 2017 EiP focuses on the metalwork tradition and the capacity for restoration by highlighting artists from across the United States as well as Germany, Belgium, and Finland (and Australia). The exhibiting artists give renewed life to objects and materials through innovative art expression rooted in traditional metalsmithing mediums such as silver, copper, and gold, and nontraditional found objects such as horsehair, syringes, soap, and credit cards. Besides prolonging the life of the object, the act of repair also speaks to our yearning to make things right and to make things whole again.

Curated by Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine’s poet laureate and an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council, EiP features jewellery, sculpture and non-traditional wearable objects by metalsmithing professionals.

- Exhibition in Print statement

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Dr Rosemary Hawker, curator of major exhibition, 'Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images', at QAGOMA

For more than fifty years, Gerhard Richter has proven his remarkable command of almost every style and genre of painting. 

'Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images' is exclusive to Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, and is the German artist’s first major Australian exhibition, with loans from public and private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, including the artist’s own collection.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Rosemary Hawker, Senior Lecturer in Art Theory, Fine Art, Griffith University, with Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, Curatorial Manager, International Art, QAGOMA, in consultation with the artist and his studio. 

Brisbane-based freelance writer, Louise Martin-Chew, writes about Rosemary Hawker's process:

This tightly curated selection of ninety works, the largest to leave the northern hemisphere, illustrates Richter’s interest in the way photography has changed the way we see. Brisbane academic Rosemary Hawker, has devoted her research to Richter (whom she has met only twice). She relates how, after years spent poring over his images in reproduction, she first saw his Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1992, at Yale some twenty years ago.

‘I was intrigued by it, irritated actually, by its blurry photographic quality.’

Hawker’s doctorate was devoted to Richter’s work (Blur: Gerhard Richter and the photographic in painting, 2007); this exhibition has been five years in the making. Hawker said, ‘Richter’s work has kept me interested all this time. You are never really able to account for everything or are able to frame it. And there’s always something new, with his work imbued with sense of looking forward and again at things.’ Personal loans and cooperation from the artist have enhanced our appreciation of his work.

Read more.

'Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images' will be on display at GOMA until 4 February 2018.

QCA convenes Richter postgraduate symposium

Interested postgraduate students, early-career researchers and academics from universities throughout Australasia are invited to attend and contribute to a dynamic dialogue on art practice as framed through Richter’s example. 10 am – 7 pm Monday 16 October 2017.

Conference Proceedings

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Julie Fragar, winner of the Ramsay Art Prize People's Choice Award

Queensland College of Art lecturer Dr Julie Fragar has won the $15,000 Ramsay Art Prize People’s Choice Award.

The biennial art award recognises Australian contemporary artists under 40 working across any medium.

Dr Fragar’s oil painting, Goose Chase: All of Us Together Here and Nowhere, won the popular prize and has been acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“I am blown away by the support I’ve received – to be selected as the people’s favourite from an exhibition of such high-quality works and artists is an honour,” she said.

“The money will help keep my practice going, but more than that, it is about recognition from those you respect and a great opportunity to network with artists from around Australia.”

This year’s judging panel consisted of Rhana Devenport, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery, contemporary Australian Artist Nell, and Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of South Australia.

Dr Fragar was one of 21 finalists, selected from more than 450 entries from across the country, including paintings, photography, video and interactive works.

Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Nick Mitzevich, said the People’s choice winner demonstrated how adventurous exhibition visitors were.

“This painting is not a straightforward representation, it is materially and conceptually layered and has obviously struck a chord with people because of its great technical prowess and its sense of mystery,” he said.

Queensland College of Art Director Professor Derrick Cherrie congratulated Dr Fragar on the prize.

“This new national award attracted some of the country’s best artists,” he said.

“Julie’s richly layered, complex work obviously struck a chord, and will be an asset to the gallery’s collection.

“Our students are lucky to be mentored by nationally recognised practicing artists.”

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Dr Julie Fragar, creates first painting of a female premier to hang in Queensland’s Parliament House.

Queensland College of Art lecturer Dr Julie Fragar made history this week with the unveiling of her official portrait of Queensland’s first female premier, Hon Anna Bligh AC.

The stunning oil portrait is the first painting of a female premier to hang in Queensland’s Parliament House.

Dr Fragar said she was “honoured” to be chosen to capture Ms Bligh for posterity.

“I believe Anna asked QAGOMA Director Chris Saines to draw up a shortlist of female, Queensland-based artists,” she said.

“She was familiar with my work from an exhibition at GOMA, and I think we share a similar aesthetic.

“The fact that she specifically wanted to work with a young, local female artist is really inspiring.”

Dr Fragar worked with Queensland College of Art photography graduate Louis Lim on a series of photographs of Ms Bligh which were used to create the stunning oil painting.

“It was a really long process – I can’t imagine anyone, let alone someone as busy as Anna sitting for a portrait over that length of time, so the photos were a great reference.”

Dr Fragar said that her signature layered paintings allowed hidden details to be revealed on repeat viewings.

“I think Anna was attracted to the idea that we could embed certain things in the painting that pointed to her achievements while she was in Parliament.

“My paintings are layered, so there are subtle references to milestones like the construction of the Kurilpa Bridge, the floods, her advocacy for women, education reforms and her incredible legacy of support for the arts.

“The more people look at this piece, the more things are revealed.”

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Carolyn McKenzie-Craig in 'The deviant woman: mechanisms for leaning '

Carolyn Craig’s work reflects her research within the coded construction of subjectivity and relates this to ideas of the performance of self and the sustenance of gendered typologies. These investigations focus on inscriptive performance as an active form of power and social control. Craig deconstructs particular gestural actions which she has identified as demonstrating specific power differentials by utilizing her own body as the site of absurd action .The performative traces of these gestures is recorded and inverted to query the basis of our everyday selves. The work asks the viewer to consider if these actions are based on biology or the privileging of entrenched systems of power.

Text pieces infiltrate the performative traces and objects as a counterpoint to absurdity and as a navigational device into the subjective position. The materiality of printmaking, drawing and photography are critical to Craig’s attempt to rewrite her subjective position. Each of these mediums contains the trace of self and the potential for active play within processes of inscription, recording, erasing and repeating.

 Opening Event: Thursday, 21 September 6pm–8pm Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 10am–4pm; Thursday 12pm–8pm

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Catherine Large, selected for 'MOSTYN Open 20'

QCA Lecturer in Jewellery + Small Objects, Catherine Large, has been selected for the MOSTYN Open 20 exhibition in Llandudno, Wales. Exhibition organisers have used her work "Strange Things Collection, 2013 - 2015" to promote the exhibition.

MOSTYN Open began in 1989 and calls out to artists, of any age and residing place, to enter work, with the selection made by a judging panel and presented at MOSTYN in an exhibition. The exhibition closes in November 2017. 

Strange Things Collection Statement

These objects, some of which are mysterious and opaque in their origins, have been given a new life and a wider audience by translating or transporting them from a box or drawer, into something that may be worn or displayed to invite a conversation. Adding to these objects with a sterling silver element is a contemplative action, allowing time to consider the origins and history of these pieces. Any work undertaken on these items is reversible, thus enabling them to return to their ‘natural’ state at some point.

- Catherine Large

The collection also toured in the Why Jewellery? exhibition. 

More information about the collection can be found on Catherine Large's website.

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Dr. Jason Nelson and Marianna Shek, shortlisted for QUT Digital Literature Award

QCA's Dr. Jason Nelson and PhD candidate Marianna Shek, are two of five shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award 2017. 

Dr Jason for Nine Billion Branches: 

The world, its politics and environments, conflicts and economies, is in peril, in disarray. We are flooded with tragic tales and the shameful deeds of others. And because of this we have lost sight of the beauty, the story and narrative hidden in the local, in the landscapes around us. We filter out the seemingly mundane of our immediate world. And yet it is in this immediate world where beauty lives, and change begins.

'Nine Billion Branches' finds a unique way to represent fragmented and non-linear narrative. It grasps at meaning in a way that is thoroughly contemporary, reminiscent of grappling with social media threads mid-conversation. In 'Nine Billion Branches' Jason Nelson makes a pointed critique of Australian culture, the commercialisation of public spaces, and the politicisation of private spaces. It is a piece that could only exist in a digital environment, but maintains a handmade aesthetic, finding beauty in mundane space of everyday life.

– Judge's Comments

Marianna Shek for Limerence:  

Limerence is a story about love, friendship, and social connections in cyberspace. The story application is designed for the tablet and is a commentary on the way our culture digests media—the way that media has been embedded into our daily lives, our guilty, voyeuristic pleasure, and our addiction to being online.

This app for the iPad opens up a chat box and a swirling sea of websites which each float to the surface to gradually reveal more about protagonist Clarice and her complex relationships online. As the characters message each other, web-based evidence mounts. This story nicely catches the flavour of love-lives online and their layers of hype, voyeurism, addiction, deception, revelation and betrayal.

– Judge's Comments

QLD Digital Literature Award Shortlist

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Elizabeth Shaw, presenter at ACJ's 20:20 Visions conference

Elizabeth Shaw recently presented at the ACJ's (Association for Contemporary Jewellery) sixth international contemporary jewellery conference in Sheffield.

Her talk was about her narrative jewellery – incorporating found objects, like the Diver neckpiece. 

20:20 Visions conference website

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Annique Goldenberg in 'Remoulding the Landscape'

MVA candidate Annique Goldenberg presents an exploratory installation of her practice-led relationship with her materials. An affinity for water in its many forms, particularly melting ice, has become Annique Goldenberg’s primary material of research, viewing it as a metaphor for both her art and life practices, as well as for the ephemeral nature of existence. At the core of her process-led practice is the aleatoric mark; the strategy of allowing chance to enter the creative process. Actively encouraging this strategy, Goldenberg works in partnership with materials and their environment, responding to their transformative outcomes over time.

Working with the properties of ink soaked melting ice, gravity and time, Goldenberg is interfering with crushed large scale monoprints on heavy weight, momigamied1 paper. The ink finds its own way through the folds and wrinkles finally settling on the Hahnemuhle paper placed underneath. Once dry, the large-scale work is unfolded, creating a sculptural terrain of peaks and valleys, revealing the path of the water. There is a tension in the paper as it holds its shape, a sense of contraction as the memory within the fibres pull in on themselves, reforming after the influence of the artist’s actions. The revealed drawing underneath holds the memory of the ‘run-off’, just a dry mark remains, the water evaporated.

Gallery Hours: 9 am – 4 pm, Monday to Friday

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Sonia York-Pryce in 'utterly (in)appropriate'

PhD candidate, dancer, photographer and film maker Sonia York-Pryce presents a visual documentation: utterly (in)appropriate, where she responds to the 8 dancers featured in her film Interprete/inappropriate Behaviour (2015).

By angling the lens to focus the gaze on her corporeality as an older dancing body, she creates a further embodied dialogue of movement; in order to confront the viewer with their preconceived ageist expectancies. She invites discourse on an ageing practice without limitations. The exhibition is curated by Dr Kelly McIllvenny

Exhibition Dates: Monday, 3 July – Friday, 14 July

Closing Event: Thursday, 13 July 6-8pm

www.soniayork-pryce.com

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Michelle Mansford in 'Up Close with Distance'

Up Close With Distance explores contemporary representations of space in painting. Drawing on the history of the window in painting as a point of departure, Michelle Mansford engages with ideas of interiority and exteriority. This collection of paintings makes use of such visual phenomena as the ambiguous space of reflections and up-close views of historical paintings seen at the point in which the illusory image disseminates to abstraction.

Painting what she considers an unstable space of possibility, Up Close With Distance describes a space of multiplicity where abstraction and illusion exist not as separate entities, but as co-existing visual systems of representation.

This exhibition forms part of Mansford’s DVA submission for examination at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Closing Event: Thursday, 13 July 6pm-8pm Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, 28 June – Sunday, 16 July

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Mika Nakamura-Mather in 'The Floating Word'

Mika Nakamura-Mather has spent much of her life away from her homeland of Japan, living, working and travelling extensively in Europe, Asia and Australia. Her work draws from the present and the past to examine the role memory plays in our notions of home, and traces how it may influence our emotional responses to geographical and cultural dislocation.

The Floating Word uses cultural iconography that is relevant to her in ways that encourage the individual to reflect on their own ideas about what ‘home’ means to them.

This exhibition forms part of Nakamura-Mather’s DVA submission with the Queensland College of Art.

 Opening Event: Friday, 5 May 2017, 6–8.30pm

Venue: WEBB Gallery and Project Gallery, QCA, 226 Grey Street, South Bank

Gallery Hours: 10 am – 4 pm, Tuesday to Saturday

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Registrations are now open for the abbe 2017 conference

Registrations are now open for the abbe 2017 (artists books brisbane event) conference at Queensland College of Art on Griffith’s South Bank campus from Thursday 6 July – Friday 7 July. Register here

The associated 6th artists' books + multiples fair 2017 will run in conjunction with the conference (Friday 7 July – Sunday 9 July, QCA).

Keynote Speakers:

from Germany | Ulrike Stoltz & Uta Schneider Ulrike Stoltz is professor of typography at Braunschweig University of Art and Uta Schneider maintains a professional book design and typography practice, Ulrike and Uta have worked collaboratively making books for over 30 years

from Australia | Dr Clyde McGill a Fulbright Scholar, a Siganto Foundation Creative Fellow and recipient of the 2006 Mackay Libris Award, Clyde McGill sustains an enigmatic art practice incorporating performance and the book

in collaboration with | JAB peer reviewed papers from the conference will subsequently be published with the Journal of Artists’ Books.

and | grahame galleries + editions we are very pleased to confirm that the artist book fair will be held in collaboration with grahame galleries + editions.

Draft conference proceedings

abbe website

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 Anastasia Tyurina in 'H20+'

Anastasia Tyurina’s visual art project involves aesthetic approaches to scientific photography made by a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), a tool that has expanded the boundaries of observation and representation of the micro world since it was introduced to scientific research in the mid-1960s. Scientific photography is commonly perceived as a way of recording scientific data through techniques such as photomicrography, high-speed photography, time-lapse photography, x-ray photography, aerial photography and many other photographic techniques.  By exploring the interplay between the indexical and iconic modalities in the process of creating photomicrographs, Tyurina seeks to imbue them with new meanings and re-appropriate scientific photography as a creative practice and a source of science communication to the general public. Specifically, this project investigates the reinterpretation of photomicrographic images of micro-scale drops of water made by the Scanning Electron Microscope after evaporation, and thus turns scientific photography into an art form.

Tyurina’s practice aims to draw attention to the qualities of water through enhanced visual details that aid in the interpretation of, and differentiation between, water samples. Building on the fact that scientific tools have brought new ways of seeing the world, the artistic application of them seeks to extend our perception. An aesthetic engagement with photomicrography gives viewers the possibility to see in the particular configurations of inherent features of water a horizon of meaning that was previously unseen as well as it refers to a creative ability to observe natural phenomena over and beyond the directly visible.

Opening Event: Saturday 1st April 4 - 6PM

Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 10am-4pm, Thursday, 12pm-8pm