Six Brilliant New Brisbane Art Exhibitions to See During May

To explore the concept of the frontier, aka the area that lurks around borders, you really do have to break a few boundaries. Like staging an exhibition across two galleries, splitting one show into site-specific sections and weaving everything around the city’s own watery dividing line (yes, we’re talking about the Brisbane river), perhaps?

That’s Frontier Imaginaries in a nutshell — and it really is just the start of the creative, contemplative extravaganza. No Longer at Ease takes over IMA, while The Life of Lines settles into the QUT Art Museum, with both bringing together leading Australian, Indigenous and international artists to reflect upon barriers, divides, and their physical, digital, geographical and cultural impact.

Of course, work by the likes of Gordon Hookey, Tom Nicholson, Megan Cope, Rachel O’Reilly, Alice Cresicher and Wendelein Van Oldenborgh is only part of the puzzle too, and not just because the two-year effort will eventually grow and evolve, complete with an offshoot in Jerusalem. Courtesy of an accompanying event program, convening to talk, read, meet and learn is just as pivotal. That’s how you really do eradicate limits, after all.

Whether they were painted centuries ago, snapped in a shopping centre photography studio in the ’80s, or graced the pages of a recently published fashion mag, many portraits of women use the same poses. Perhaps the lovely lady in the frame is turned sideways and smiling. Maybe she’s pouting while looking over her shoulder. Sometimes, she’s staring enigmatically off into the distance.

Yep, they’re the kind of pictures everyone has seen countless times, but few people stop to contemplate in depth. By combining portrait photography and expressionist painting, Jess Cochrane’s latest exhibition, FearLess, aims to inspire audiences to ponder why these images recur, what their repeated use says about perceptions of femininity, and the role the male gaze has played throughout history.

That might be a considerable task; however it’s surprising just how exaggerating and amplifying commonly seen images with splashes of paint and colour can spark many a train of thought. With the show representing Cochrane’s attempt to create “space for the honest, powerful, raw and violent beauty that is all-inclusive”, after seeing her pieces, you’ll never look at a portrait the same way again.

First things first: no, Artisan hasn’t fashioned its own take on the reality TV show that once beamed a certain wannabe US presidential candidate into our living rooms. Instead, the gallery has turned over its space to thirteen creatives that were once apprentices in fields as varied as shoemaking and blacksmithing.

If those areas all sound like traditional crafts and trades that have come under threat from modern mass production methods, that’s because they are. That’s part of the point of the exhibition. By showcasing the creations of talented leather makers, woodworkers and more, The Apprenticeship shines a spotlight on the skill and style evident in their work.

Of course, highlighting the training aspect of pursuing handcraft-oriented careers is also on the agenda, hence the choice of name. As you peruse their efforts, you’ll discover their stories, learn how they got to where they are, and consider the future of everything from sign-writing to brick-making.

It’s the creative breakthrough that had to happen — and it did, six decades ago. The more that popular culture started to surround artists via advertising, television and comic books, the more that they worked it into their pieces. Yes, that’s how pop art was born.

These days, we live in post-pop art times; however you just can’t take the ‘pop’ out of modern society. You can interrogate, subvert, examine and reconstruct it, though. In fact, that’s what group exhibition Pop Goes the Weirdo is all about.

Sydney’s Simon Lovelace and SKEL have joined forces with Brisbane’s Clay Smith and Tiffany Atkin to bring highbrow thinking to their range of lowbrow works. Whether manipulating previously ‘innocent’ images and characters, mashing up well-known imagery to get to the heart of the human condition, giving poster art a surrealist edge or challenging the boundaries of femininity, their two-week show is much, much more than a collection of paintings of soup cans.

You’ve probably heard about Brisbane in the ’80s. Under the conservative Joh Bjelke-Petersen government, times were tough — particularly if you were an arts lover, creative practitioner, or just liked going out and having a good time.

With dark days like that not that long ago in the city’s past, it’s little surprise that Brisbane’s current hustle and bustle still inspires wonder from those who lived through it. It wasn’t all bad news, though. Many artists left, but some persevered, hung out at One Flat, A Room, That Space, The Observatory, and John Mills National, and tried to make a go of it.

ephemeral traces: Brisbane’s Artist-Run Scene in the 1980s documents the latter category: the progressive folks who dug in their heels, attempted to ply their trade and created an arts scene around those five key spaces. Through artworks, documentation and other bits and pieces, the exhibition delves into their artist-run activity and examines the projects, publications and places at the centre. Yes, getting all nostalgic about retro pop culture and art might be common, but this is a truly different kind of ’80s flashback.

The glare from a ray of sunshine bouncing off of a window, or the silhouette that the shadow a building casts: they’re they type of frequent yet fleeting occurrences we all see, even if we don’t always give them our utmost attention. They also stem from the interaction of two important parts of our modern environment, aka the ever-present natural elements and the man-made structures our society has fashioned.

In his latest collection, Japanese-born, Australian-based artist Kenji Uranishi contemplates these instances, aspects and ideas, all while working with his preferred medium. Across a series of handcrafted ceramic pieces inspired by his time in both countries and responding to the importance of place and the role of the city, he attempts to capture the short-lived interplay of light on the urban landscape.

The stunning presentation of 50 new shapes and forms that results might be called Momentary; however that’s a reflection of the passing seconds Uranishi’s work endeavours to immortalise, and not of a judgment of the exhibition’s impact. Indeed, whether you gaze upon the showcase of patterns and designs at your own pace, take a tour with the artist or participate in his first-ever solo masterclass, we’re betting that you’ll remember the experience for much longer than a moment. Check it out before it ends on May 22.