2009

'New Skin'

This exhibition celebrates the Queensland Centre for Photography relocation to a new purpose built gallery. The show brings together the work of a wide range of contemporary photographic art practitioners connected through community and residency within the State of Queensland.

This new centre is better situated and equipped to engage audiences and develop partnerships that will further cultivate photographic art practice in Queensland and Australia. This exhibition is a celebration of diversity of practice and symbolizes the idea that individual contribution to community strengthens the fabric that supports us all. In this exhibition you will witness a wide range of dialogues with and through the medium. Dialogues where the environment whether virtual, constructed or found, personal, cultural or historical, underpin the motifs, forms and ideas embedded in the images. Identifiable landscape, vegetation and skies may be clearly visible in some photographs but in others a sense of time and place is referential, fictional or metaphorical. There is a breadth and depth of practice here.

Naturally as a curatorial premise ‘Queensland Photographic art’ is a tricky classification, full of arbitrary definitions and lines of demarcation. The convenience that urges one to search for identity through State finds no clear borders and although illusive, it is an intriguing and slippery game to explore various links and currencies that may exist among contemporary practitioners who share this social, cultural and political history.

If the art/documentary photograph is a vehicle to develop discourses that expand culturally our understanding and appreciation of diverse physical, social and personal environments, this exhibition sets in motion numerous dialogues. These multiple perspectives are further strengthened through broader domestic and international orientations, which is a clear component of the QCP strategic plan.

The diverse range of histories and locales that is Queensland, the lineage of practitioners and institutions, the influence of climate, landscape and popular culture all remain navigational signposts as one negotiates the treacherous waters of a neat classification of Queensland photography.

Barbara Hurd in her book, 'Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs and Human Imagination', uses the analogy of a river to discuss the nature of imagination and I draw on this to describe the problem of a Queensland typology. Hurd writes of the rational impossibility and the more appropriate usefulness of poetry in holding such slippery notions together.

The one essential quality of the imagination is that it moves – in wide sweeps, in pinched steps, out to sea, down into the interior. The imagination is polytheistic and polygamous: its groundspring is multiplicity, not singularity. Trying to press a single meaning on its imagery is like asking a river to hold still. It will squirm out of your interpretation, jump its banks, form new rivulets and bayous in its relentless churn toward the open ocean. Image invites image, which suggests mirrors and the ceaseless, duplicitous interplay of one thing and its reflection.” Hurd 2001

We each have our own personal relationship to places, forged by physical experience, memory and a kind of emotional romantic fiction. Simon Schama reminds us in his book 'Landscape and Memory' that there is no landscape other than the one we construct from our own cultural heritage.

For me in mid summer Queensland while writing this on Stradbroke Island, near Brisbane in Moreton Bay, my cultural heritage is mixed with salty breezes, hot sand and warm rain mixed with perspiration, bright bleached white light and deafening insects. In conditions like these it is difficult and undesirable to separate environment from individual. These landscapes, cultural and geographic have been formative to QCP identity and growth in the new environment will continue the development of a reciprocal relationship between practitioner, geopolitical context and audience.

As the QCP continues to develop and mature, it must anticipate and respond to the economic, social and political contexts that support it. Change may be a given but each form has its own relevance and aptness.

Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, writes ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly and clearly this move by the QCP is a part of that creative evolution.

Working with the broader community of South Bank will allow the QCP to strengthen its entrepreneurial approach and remain progressive and innovative in finding ways to expand and intensify audience engagement.

So how might the new environment engage new audiences and better support the development of photographic art practice in Queensland and beyond?

In five years of prolific activity the QCP has confirmed its distinctiveness as an inclusive and resourceful institution, responsive to its community while focused on progressive goals.

The transformation of the Queensland Centre for Photography is supported by the increasing sophistication apparent in visual arts culture in Queensland. Photographic art practice will flourish for audiences and practitioners alike with this specifically designed photography and video gallery located within the heart of Brisbane’s arts precinct at South Bank, alongside institutions like the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art and the new and expansive arts focused South Bank Institute of TAFE.

Visual art research and dialogue will be enhanced as the QCP joins the South Bank precinct, the cultural hub of arts in Brisbane. This new arts venue will be a great place to meet, mount exhibitions, provide work experience, nurture new audiences and encourage established and emerging arts practitioners to further extend their practice.

The Queensland Centre for Photography has matured at a rapid rate and to enhance its partnerships through exhibitions, educational programs, publications and collection, the organization outgrew the facilities that had supported it so well.

The Queensland Centre for Photography is taking on a new skin and even though it sheds the previous accommodation, with its relaxed and friendly atmosphere, easy access and packed openings full of regulars, we take with us memories of the occasional wild party. Like David Broker’s farewell where Lindy Chamberlain impersonator, artist Gia Mitchell, battled the ‘dingo’ in a jelly wrestle and the charismatic poetic speeches by the previous Minister for the Arts, Matt Foley.

I’m confident the QCP will retain some of this personality and character, so fondly remembered, as it moves into a new stage of development, pertinent to this phase but not superior to the old skin that fitted so well its own time.

Bergson, Henri, 1911,Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt and Company

Hurd, Barbara, 2001, Stirring the Mud –On Swamps, Bogs and Human Imagination p. 36 Beacon Press, Boston

Schama, Simon, 1995, Landsape and Memory, HarperCollins

Marian Drew

Associate Professor and Convener of Photography Queensland College of Art, Griffith University