Speaking volumes: on our love affair with art books
The growing cultural interest in art books reflects the enduring power of the printed word. Jane O’Sullivan takes a closer look.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Polly Borland, an Australian artist based in Los Angeles, has won the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2017.
The award is acquisitive and director of the Gold Coast City Gallery Tracy Cooper-Lavery says that she is very pleased to have Borland’s winning work, Two Heads A, 2016, join the collection.
“One of the things that is becoming really apparent with our collection of contemporary art is that photography is a really strong point. Mainly because of this award, but also because we are actively pursuing and purchasing contemporary photography,” Cooper-Lavery explains. “And Polly Borland is someone who has been on my radar for some time, so to have the work entered through the award, I am thrilled. I think her work is going to fit really well with the story that we are telling in Australian art through photography.”
But Cooper-Lavery says that, so far, gallery visitors have responded very well to the winning work. “And I think this is a bit of a testament to the Gold Coast audience,” she says. “The Gold Coast audience is now embracing art more and more.”
“The cliché is that the Gold Coast is just a cultural wasteland, but it really isn’t the case,” Cooper-Lavery adds. ”I was working here at the Gold Coast City Gallery in the 1990s, and I’ve been back for about 18 months. And in that space of time I really can see a difference in the audience and their understanding of contemporary art, and it’s just great. It’s good for the city, and for us as a gallery knowing that we can take more risks and start to really push our audience and their expectations of contemporary art. So photos like Borland’s are just seen as really great works and great for the collection!”
Borland’s photo was selected by Chris Saines, director of Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), from a field of 34 finalists. Darren Sylvester’s Broken Model and Danie Mellor’s The distance (envisioning Girrugarr) were also acquired.
Describing Borland’s winning photo in his announcement Saines said. “It is a highly considered and resolved image made in response to a host of passing strange but essentially unanswerable questions – a portrait of doubt, perhaps; or a symbol of an inherent struggle in the sitter’s own sense of self?”
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2017 Exhibition includes works by all of the finalists: Melissa Anderson, Dane Beesley, Scott Belzner, Fabrice Bigot, Polly Borland, Tammy Boyce, Aaron Bradbrook, Madeleine Burke, Anna Carey, David Chatfield, Dale Collier, Sean Coyle, Gerwyn Davies, Donna Davis, Shoufay Derz, Jeremy Drape, Merilyn Fairskye, Liss Fenwick, George Fetting, Ursula Frederick and Katie Hayne, Natalie Grono, Nina Hanley, Lee Harrop, Petrina Hicks, Jon Lewis, Tim Levy, Abbey McCullock, Danie Mellor, Helen Okey, Camille Serisier, Darren Sylvester, Hiromi Tango, Linda Wachtel and Emma Wright.
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2017 Exhibition
Gold Coast City Gallery
9 September – 22 October
The growing cultural interest in art books reflects the enduring power of the printed word. Jane O’Sullivan takes a closer look.
Radical Textiles, A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows us how textiles evoke material memories while keeping the radical lineage of needle and thread alive.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Natalya Hughes has a conflicted fascination with modernist men like Freud, Kirchner and de Kooning. Jane O’Sullivan takes a look at The Interior, the Institute of Modern Art monograph on her recent practice, and discovers difficult and provocative questions about not just the representation of women in art and culture, but also the careers of women artists in Australia.
Now showing at Home of the Arts (HOTA), the sophomore Gold Coast Triennial, Here and Now, brings together 42 contemporary artists to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community.
A new event has arrived in Melbourne’s cultural calendar with the inauguration of the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: an exhibition that aims to showcase the breadth and diversity of contemporary sculpture in Victoria.
