WRITING

It’s graduate season.

In this highlight of the annual arts calendar, graduating student-artists showcase their first major bodies of work. Among the anxious-swell of opening night crowds, most visible are the artists and their accompanying retinues of proud family and friends.

Blocking out the majority of his canvas, Simon Degroot paints a large, delightfully pink and deliberately off-kilter asterisk. Slowly tracing its contours reveals a playful tension between the digital perfection of its source (the little star of typography) and the human error of the artist’s hand. The final stroke—a diagonal line that travels from bottom left to upper right corner—is especially evocative, its gentle curve suggestive of other soft, fleshy forms.

GOMA’s yawning atrium has displayed an enviable array of artists and objects. From Carsten Holler’s slippery dip (Left/Right Slide (2010)) to Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s hypercolour Nervescape (2016) and motorbikes suspended from above, art lovers know this space as one of spectacle and scale.

Brown. Blue. White. Natalie Lavelle’s newest body of work exclusively uses these colors. Each conjures the natural world: dark handfuls of dirt, midday skies, the ocean’s depths, and a landscape lost to a thick Winter’s snowstorm.

In sharp relief with the student-throngs of campus, QUT Art Museum is quiet and dark. Their current exhibition showcases Australian-Japanese artist couple, Ken + Julia Yonetani, and the duo’s ongoing engagement with the environment.

Online phenomenon, community project, artwork? 

The humble postcard appears and reappears throughout art history. Just a glance at my desk provides an introduction to their proliferation.

For me, exhibition reviews satisfy one of two possibilities: to think through an exhibition more deeply or to see something new. For Lemonade’s opening review, I chose the latter.

It’s at the end of the world, my husband said, as he added The Condensery to the GPS.

Libby Derham’s watercolours are visually light and loose, yet dense with meaning. Each work deftly records the sometimes-figurative, sometimes-abstracted colours of her surroundings; the scrawled song of local birds; and the mark-making hand of the artist, who stands—immersed in nature—at her easel.

A is for Alphabet. 

Deanna Hitti’s M is for Madreseh (School) unfurls the alphabet across the gallery’s walls, recalling young children’s textbooks. You might know the type, reading: a is for apple, b is for bear, c is for cat . . .

Adam Southgate’s paintings are engrossing. Although populated with familiar images and scenes, there’s no easily-digestible narrative nor compositional simplicity that leads our eyes around the canvas in a pre-determined path. Instead, Southgate presents a kaleidoscopic collage of fragments: a montage.

“There is only memory, the past does not exist . . . If a past does not literally exist, no more does death, only mourning”.

Following the loss of his close friend, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida penned these existential words, complicating our understanding of temporality and mortality.

Dearest reader,

Hello! It’s a special pleasure to have you here: reading, thinking, experiencing and imagining Michelle Vine: Soft Touch. I’m writing to tease out some of the themes in the exhibition.