OUTER FACE
Outer Face is the latest iteration of Outer Space’s digital projection public art program, on display every evening between 5:30pm – 11:30pm across the building façade of Judith Wright Arts Centre. On show from 26 April 2022 – onwards.
For more info on works exhibited between May 2021 – February 2022, see Location, Location, Location.
Tony Albert, Valley Walkabout (2022)
18 November — 18 December 2022
Tony Albert’s projection Valley Walkabout (2022) considers the surrounding night sky as an infinite canvas, featuring flying creatures such as Superman, bats, spaceships, rockets and planes, and even a flying goldfish – because “the water was getting too hot and it needed to leave its home” (1). Ever the self-professed Australien, Albert might be taken for the Basquiat crown clad E.T. in the middle of the canvas, gazing lovingly into the far reaches of the galaxy as space invaders scout for something to devour.
Collage and iconoclasm are hallmarks of Albert’s universe. In Walkabout, one can recognise a number of established motifs, while others are new. Perhaps of most immediate visual impact are the 3D background pyramids: made out of Aboriginal playing cards, they relate back to Albert’s imagery collection of Aboriginalia, a term coined by the artist to describe historic objects bearing inauthentic representations of Aboriginal people and culture. In Walkabout, this iconography also includes kitsch caricatures and memorabilia of Aboriginal boys and men as either doll-like figurines or stereotypical “noble savages”. Albert hollows out all meaning from the pyramids except for its diagonal intersecting lines, envisioning them instead as cross boomerangs from the coastal rainforests of North Queensland. From Cardwell to the Mossman River, cross boomerangs were thrown exclusively by older Aboriginal boys and men, their tips lit at night to produce a blazing fire-like path in the sky (2).
Valley Walkabout’s pulsating bullseye targets converse with the caricatures and boomerangs. Their reflection in the lens of CCTV cams allude to not only the universal feeling of being under constant watch in public spaces, but the relentless persecution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boys and men in this sphere. Interwoven into this unfolding visual narrative are Walkabout’s passages of text, aligned and kerned like verses of a concrete poem. The larger Once upon A time crosses with the vertically cascading statement, VOTE YES FOR ABORIGINES, their perpendicular relation intermingling into variations such as VOTE YES Once FOR ABORIGINES and VOTE upon A time. Never one to undermine the interpretive capacity of his audience, Albert then frames these sentences with the follow-up: I WANT NOTHING [/] EVERYTHING. For the year is 2022, a Voice to Parliament referendum is on the horizon, yet what is sought politically is but fundamental common sense, a given for what was, is, and always has been, Aboriginal land.
Albert’s visual ambiguities are liberating in that they absorb and rewrite symbols of colonial oppression in favour of a humorous and optimistic high road. For example, does Once upon A time speak of the erasure and the stealing of Aboriginal peoples and culture, or of deep time? The impossible geometry of the red circle in the right corner of Walkabout offers equally ambiguous responses, at once standing in for the former, while pointing to a stronger, infinitely actualising time space continuum where Aboriginal culture, stories, and dreams prevail.
Notes
(1) Tony Albert, email exchange with artist, November 19, 2022.
(2) “Indigenous cross boomerang from the Cairns area, 1900,” Australian Museum, last modified March 17, 2021, https://australian.museum/learn/cultures/atsi-collection/boomerangs/indigenous-cross-boomerang-from-the-cairns-area1900/
—
Tony Albert’s multidisciplinary practice investigates contemporary legacies of colonialism, prompting audiences to contemplate the human condition. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, Albert explores the ways in which optimism can be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses important questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories.
Albert has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include; Remark, Sullivan+Strumpf (2022); Conversations with Margaret Preston, Sullivan+Strumpf (2021); Duty of Care, Canberra Glassworks (2020); Wonderland, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2019); Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong (2019); Confessions, Contemporary Art Tasmania (2019); and Visible, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018).
Past Projections
Isabel Hood, Data Capture: Four Days in May 2022 (2022)
21 October — 17 November 2022
Isabel Hood's practice explores the limitations of data as a tool for understanding a subject, and the way datasets can never adequately represent the complex and subjective realities of an individual's existence. While traditional displays of data focus on efficient analysis and presentation, Hood's work emphasises a slower engagement with information and atypical reporting metrics. Although her process of collection and display is subjective and defies the typical legibility tools of data visualisation, its speculative design nature recognises ideas of data re-ownership and emphasises the already inherent biased and flawed existence of current data collection and presentation processes.
Hood's projection artwork, Data Capture: Four Days in May 2022 (2022), depicts a selection of days in which she captured personal data in May of this year. Recorded data is transformed into undulating vessels. In an attempt to grapple fleeting and ambiguous experiences, emotive data is modelled into something seemingly solid and tangible.
As well as recording moods, Hood's collection process involves documenting her surroundings at the time of each recording using other qualitative methods of data collection, including photographing, painting, flatbed and 3D scanning. Collaged textures, patterns and objects, from the artist’s daily recordings, are translated into the digital space. They emerge incomplete, glitched and fragmented, as they are forced into the constraints and limitations of the data collection process.
—
Isabel Hood is a digital artist and designer living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her practice explores alternative approaches to data collection and display to question ideas of data ownership, vulnerability and the frequent decontextualisation of data in the process of its collection and visualisation. Hood completed a bachelor of Visual Communication at the Queensland College of Art in 2015, and a Fine Art Honours degree at the University of Tasmania, School of Creative Arts in Nipaluna/Hobart in 2019.
Holly Anderson, Blue sun/white shadow (2022)
23 September — 20 October 2022
Holly Anderson is concerned with perceptual affect: the smorgasbord of stimuli that our physiological system is immersed in as we traverse our way through a world of liquid experience. Those familiar with her work will recognise the sun as an almost omnipresent character. When the artist describes to me how disorienting and consuming it feels to be hit by the (very hot light that is the Queensland) sun, I register not only the toll of that discomfort, but a stoic force that lies behind the body as system, eager to document it. It is a force that refuses to assign moral value to what it feels: in that the effects of bodily experiences often cannot be described adequately in linguistic terms, to Anderson they carry no good nor evil, simply a vast, meditative strangeness.
In her projection Blue sun/white shadow (2022), Anderson experiments with two painterly works: the first depicts grid-like, structured pool tiles distorting and shimmering in reaction to the pool’s water surface and the white sunlight. The second renders the shadow of a growing tree against a white trellis. Within the space of a few erratic breaths, the sun’s white reflection begins to engulf the pool on one side of the facade, while on the other side, the tree’s blue shadow creeps over the trellis. Yet both of these look nonsensical: pixel-like and formless, they are more akin to blurred vision, or the experience of photopsia (1). To Anderson, this momentary loss of perceptual coherence points to the illogical nature of experience. While it remains unquantifiable, it is immensely felt.
Notes
(1) Photopsia is the phenomenon of seeing light or dark flashes in one’s field of vision, typically when the retina goes from no light to too much light.
—
Holly Anderson works with painting to investigate sensory experiences with light and landscape. In continual reference to the bathers and sunlit subjects of romantic Australian landscape painting, various ways sunlight might accentuate the limits of perception or describe a strange permeability of the lit world are tentatively explored. In 2017 she completed a BFA with Honours at the Queensland College of Art in Meanjin, Brisbane where she now teaches sessionally.
Photography: Cian Sanders
Sasha Parlett, The Valley (2022)
26 August — 22 September 2022
Sasha Parlett’s The Valley (2022) features a living, breathing Buderim rainforest on Kabi Kabi country. Alternating between the macro and the micro, the mindful lens of photographer and filmmaker Sasha Parlett demonstrates her connection to country and appreciation of the many facets of its most life-nurturing element:
“Water is a big part of many Dreamtime stories and can have a huge significance in culture. For me, I love the way that freshwater and saltwater can exist so closely to one another, and that some countries have both. My family are Barkindji and Malyangapa. Barkindji people come from the Baaka (the Darling River). I have a big love for both Kabi Kabi and Jinabarra country as I was raised and educated in this area. The nature is so vast with beautiful oceans on the coast line and a hinterland full of waterfalls. Buderim holds a lot of memories for me as a child. We would venture out for the day to climb the trees and rocks and play in the water.”
The Valley features dancer and choreographer Sheriden Newman leaping rhythmically across and around a low-set waterfall, which foregrounds the diverse foliage of the rainforest’s canopy. Describing her connection to dance, Parlett explains: “[It] started when I was in primary school – some local TO's [Traditional Owners] taught me traditional First Nations totem dancing. From there I have made it my goal to learn dancing in many countries I have travelled to. Dance shares so many stories and can evoke such creativity and emotion. I taught modern dance through my twenties and still practice dance today.
My goal is to continue working within communities with our local knowledge holders to create site-specific works that uncover the deep rich histories of the country.”
—
Sasha Parlett is the proud descendant of May Hunt (the first Indigenous woman to break in horses), born on Darumbal country and educated and raised in Kabi Kabi ways. She fondly remembers her Nanna telling her that her blonde hair was due to the family running low on ochre before she was born. Parlett’s body of work includes the award-winning film Fallen (2019) (director, producer); THUMP's music video Shake It (writer, producer, editor), which was awarded a yewwy in the inaugural Sunny Coast Showdown; Barrumbi Kids (attachment editor), produced by NITV and Screen Australia; and the 2022 documentary We Are One (director, currently in production), whose aim is to educate people on the stories of the First XI and shed light on cricketing for mob in Australia. Sasha holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries from the University of the Sunshine Coast. When not working on film projects or photographing, she can be found in the local community planning and organising Wan'diny NAIDOC events.
Photography: Cian Sanders
Kellie O’Dempsey, Wish You Were Here Too (2022)
22 July — 25 August 2022
Kellie O’Dempsey, Wish You Were Here Too (2022) [video still]. Courtesy of the artist.
Wish You Were Here Too (2022) is a reimagining of Kellie O’Dempsey’s exhibition Wish You Were Here (2021), displayed at Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland, in 2021, and NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Cairns, in 2022. In this façade-specific iteration, readymade collages made from billboard poster strips – which O’Dempsey has been collecting for years – appear mountain-like and menacing. Meanwhile, a rendition of ghostly silhouettes of the artist, their movements softened by a stack of echoing frames, hold their balance precariously. Nearby, mechanic-looking fishes with giant eyeballs for bodies float by without a care in the world. Taken together, these minutely considered elements allude to O’Dempsey’s similarly complex inner world. They are reflections on the balancing act of holding space for family, which O’Dempsey has experienced through being the primary carer of a sick and elderly parent: “For me, the unknowable and surreal landscape of transitioning from daughter to [the] parent of my parent is one of endurance” (1). Conscious of not falling over, O’Dempsey’s senses seem heightened to the “rocky landscape that is contemporary living,” one that she likens to an absurd abyss, or a “post-Covid treadmill” (2). Yet the artist understands the need to forge ahead into a “psychedelic continuum” (1): a rhythm beyond linear time. I imagine that for O’Dempsey, this room of one’s own, this rich euphoric world, lies very presently within.
Notes
(1) Wish You Were Here exhibition excerpt, courtesy of the artist.
(2) O’Dempsey, Kellie. ‘Re: Final video - Kellie O'Dempsey’. Email, 2022.
—
Kellie O’Dempsey creates site-generated installations and performances that integrate projection, video, collage, architectural space, gestural line, performance and digital drawing. Creating in both solo and collaborative formats with sound artists and contemporary dance practitioners, O’Dempsey’s diverse practice explores, deconstructs and heightens the concept of public space as shared experience. O’Dempsey manipulates space and alters perception to transform and reinvigorate the familiar, and to create a sense of brilliance. Using performance, play, line and colour, O’Dempsey’s public productions enable an inclusive form of cultural interaction. The immersive site installation and performance drawing works invite the audience to engage directly with the visceral process of making. Kellie’s past performances include: Art after Dark; Pier 2/3; 18th Biennale of Sydney; MONA FOMA, Hobart; White Night Melbourne; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Photography: Cian Sanders
Phoebe Paradise, Mallrats (2022)
24 June — 21 July 2022
Phoebe Paradise, Mallrats (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Phoebe Paradise’s sense of place is in lockstep with Brisbane’s newfound sense of confidence that it is, in fact, a city worthy of three-dimensional identity. Fiercely local and running independently as a brand since 2014, Phoebe has stuck loyally to the illustrious 4000 postcode, holding up a sort of mirror to Brisbane’s many faces and iterations: the paradisaical, sure, but also the bad, the dirty, and the ugly.
Growing up in a music and arts circle which un-ironically professed their love of Brisbane by snapping bright blue skies, only to then share them under the passport shredder banner – “a city so good you don’t need a passport!” –, I have grown (understandably) averse to the Brisbanite celebratory spirit. A by-product of Expo 88’s tourism schism, it fails to acknowledge the various dark histories entrenched along the way, from Aboriginal land-grabbing through to military in-fighting, government censorship, and – last but not least – police brutality toward anyone who dared not be a quiet Australian.
In Phoebe’s vast and various imagined worlds, on the other hand, there is never an effort to smooth the terrifying or the turbulent. Quite the contrary: darkness becomes celebratory, a kind of negative bliss – or an inverse manifestation of the aesthetic notion that is the sublime. In Mallrats (2022), Phoebe’s distinctive illustrative style depicts a gig-hopping scene plucked straight from a night out in Fortitude Valley. Drowned in neon lights, a “cast of freaks, punks and weirdos” (1) waits to be stamped into a venue seemingly unaffected by inflation pricing while a sedan drives eerily by. As accomplice voyeurs, our viewpoint shifts alongside the driver’s slow revving. A haunting presence of the uncanny sets in as the neon contorts into varying shades, the street characters getting progressively weirder and more hellish. This demonisation of space is what Foucault calls the agenda of the gothic sublime (2) – but we could just call it Pig City, Bris Vegas, or even the essence of Phoebe Paradise.
Notes
(1) “‘Mallrats’ Outer Face Projection Viewing,” Phoebe Paradise event, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.facebook.com/events/792116728827991/
(2) Vijay Mishara, “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in The Gothic Sublime (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 25.
—
Phoebe Sheehy aka Phoebe Paradise is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, musician and designer based in Meanjin, Brisbane, producing illustrations, textiles, murals and public art installations. In her early career, Phoebe’s graphic lexicon developed quickly via a consistent output of punk flyers and merch for bands around Australia. Soon after, she began experimenting with textile designs, creating capsule collections for Paradise Shop. A boutique, gallery and DIY venue in Fortitude Valley, it was owned and managed by Paradise between 2017–2019, garnering a strong fanbase both locally and internationally. While the brick and mortar shop has ceased since, its online counterpart lives on.
Phoebe’s practice explores the everyday poetics of her hometown’s multiple identities through aesthetics that at once point to its gothic sublimity and sunshine poptimism. Most recently, the artist has been developing work that examines the various incongruous architectures of Brisbane as a mode through which to recount its myriad histories. Notable recent works and exhibitions include the video Subtropical Surreal (2020), acquired by Brisbane City Council's Public Art Collection; the group exhibition Disintegration (2022), Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville; and the Paddington Terraces Kooka! Trail public art project (2022). Phoebe’s debut solo exhibition Sunburnt in the suburbs is due to launch on November 5, 2022 at Pine Rivers Art Gallery.
Photography: Cian Sanders
Tori-Jay Mordey, National Reconciliation Week 2022 – Be Brave. Make Change.
27 May — 23 June 2022
Tori-Jay Mordey, National Reconciliation Week 2022. Video documentation: Cameron Hock, 3p Studio.
This year, Tori-Jay Mordey’s bold figurative illustrations are the face of National Reconciliation Week 2022, taking place between 27 May–3 June. Following the 2021 State of Reconciliation in Australia Report, it was found that the reconciliation movement in Australia is in dire need to push past ‘safe’ to ‘brave’ on issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Brave actions include truth-telling and actively addressing inequality, systemic racism, and instances in which the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are ignored, denied, or reduced.
Commenting on her involvement in the campaign, Mordey states: “Working on this project was a huge honour for me as a Torres Strait artist, to be able to help push the narrative of National Reconciliation Week, Be Brave, Make Change. It's important to keep these discussions alive and to strive for a better future, to encourage genuine connection and push for equality and equity. We can make a change. But we can't do it alone. Be brave, and start the conversation today.”
—
Tori-Jay Mordey is an established Indigenous Australian illustrator and artist currently based in Brisbane. Over the years, Tori-Jay has worked across mediums such as painting, digital illustration, drawing, printmaking, film and mural works. Exploring her Torres Strait Islander and English heritage, Tori-Jay often bases works around her family and siblings as a way of understanding herself. She combines stylised figures with realistic representations to distort, exaggerate, and expose the vulnerabilities of the human experience. Tori-Jay has exhibited and worked collaboratively across a number of projects; her most recent engagements include Penguin Random House, Museum of Brisbane (MoB), SBS (SBS Voices), Brisbane Street Art Festival and Brisbane Powerhouse. Notably, in 2017 she co-developed the interactive website K’Gari (Fraser Island) with fellow artist Fiona Foley, which went on to become a finalist in the UNAA Media Awards, two prestigious web design awards, as well as being showcased at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFFA). Tori-Jay holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (2016).
Photography: Cian Sanders
David Spooner, 22 Stories (2022)
26 April — 26 May 2022
David Spooner, Day 57: Forbidden Treachery – the new fragrance (2022). Detail of series 22 Stories (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Since 2017, David Spooner has set himself an annual drawing challenge, beginning with a drawing a week, and since 2018, completing a drawing a day, using permanent markers to produce a series of same-sized works. They are vignettes into a psychedelic subconscious populated by salivating T-Rexes, fluro-patterned aliens, smirking dogs, and smiling daisies whose pearly white petals stand on the ready to masticate you. In his aptly titled month-long Outer Space façade takeover, 22 Stories (2022), Spooner envisions a selection of works made in 2022 scrolling across the Judy as to mimic the motion of news tickers (albeit lazy ones!), where repeating elements glide in perpetual misalignment. The result is a celebration of Spooner’s colour mastery, confidence, and commitment to the creative bit.
—
Over the past few years, David Spooner has been searching for hidden structures within his seemingly wild and scattered practice. He weaves connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and materials to make new work, and in the process reveals the complexity of the inner logic that drives his practice. Working with textiles, drawing and found materials, the artist knits, sews and stitches to produce objects and installations that play with literal and imaginative narratives. Spooner holds a Master of Visual Arts from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (2008), a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours from Queensland University of Technology (2003), and a Graduate Diploma of Education (Early Years) (2010), also from QUT. He was a visiting artist in the Sculpture department at the Australian National University (2011) and the recipient of the Cathyrn Mittelheuser Travel Grant (2008). More recently, he has exhibited nationally and collaborated with a number of galleries and Artist Run Initiatives.
Most recently, Spooner has developed works for exhibitions and programs such as Snapshot – Take 2 (2022), Outer Space, Brisbane (in collaboration with Tara Pattenden); Time Travellers (2021), Woollongabba Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Clove Hitch (2021), Saw Tooth ARI, Launceston. The upcoming group exhibition Come Together (2022) at Pine Rivers Art Gallery, Moreton Bay, will feature new works by David/David, an artist duo between David and long-time collaborator David Creed.
David Spooner is a resident artist at Outer Space’s artist studios in Chinatown, Fortitude Valley.
Photography: Cian Sanders
Christopher Bassi, Grow (2020). Photography: Cian Sanders.
 |
This project has been assisted by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. |