Had a few hours to hang out in the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) on Wednesday. Not long enough to see everything (and not everything was open), but enough to see some things to inspire me.
Patricia Picanini’s piece with Chairs (The Observer) of course caught my eye because of the chairs. I love the stack of it. I’m not a fan of her weird surreal people, but love the chairs. There was also a cardboard box arch, not sure who did that, but it’s in my brain as a thing to do if i have a big space to decorate!
NS Harsha’s We come, we eat, we sleep i’ve only taken close ups of, and what i liked was the repeating patterns of ordinary activities. and the colours, of course.
Howard Arkley’s Stucco Home I mostly photographed to ask Gary Smith from BAG if he knew of him (I assume he does), because Gary’s recent work was also suburban homes.
Then Syagini Ratna Wulan’s piece of rainbow colours that changes depending on where you stand. I took this in case I needed a metaphor on perspective for work. I’ll probably forget it’s there, but I’d been teaching metaphor the day before, and was collecting things!
Michael Parekowhai’s The Horn of Africa is just beautiful. Pianos are one of my favourite objects, and this one is so shiny.
Sandra Selig’s Untitled from Webs from my garden series made me think of Cathie Edlington’s beautiful work with watercolour pencils, and I mostly photographed it to send to her. I don’t think i have the patience to do this (unless I can take a web and put it on a print plate?).
Several years ago Cathie and I went to see a Yayoi Kusama exhibition in Brisbane (well we went for Gerhard Richter and also saw Yayoi). Anyway, the white room covered in dots which you see in the photos below was in its infancy. This time around I added the larger dots they gave me, but got bored and returned half of them at the end. There’s a video showing the move from white room to dotted room. Metaphorically it’s about the power of the people, and also, weirdly the futility of any one individual to make a big difference when everyone else’s dots can cancel out your dots.
Sumakshi Singh’s Afterlife (Door and shadow) was also lovely, reminded me, of course of the Do Ho Suh works I saw a while ago at the MCA.
Sandra Selig (of the web pictures in the other room) also had a 3d beaded spider-web like thing which was just beautiful – when I moved my head it moved around. Stills do not do it justice.
