Gift Trilogy
Willoh Weiland
15 July–19 August
Opening: Friday 14 July, 4.30pm–7.30pm. Free cake, courtesy of CWA Lindisfarne.
Gift Trilogy is a series of video works celebrating volunteerism.
A body of work spanning five years and created by artist Willoh Weiland in collaboration with renowned director of photography and auteur Sandi Sissel ASC, cinematographers Keith Deverell and Ursula Woods, and composer Kelly Ryall.
Together the works in Gift Trilogy sit in the realm of portraiture and draw on visual tropes of cinema. Elevating the participants and their work, this exhibition represents a counter to the often invisible labour that volunteers contribute to the communities and spaces they serve.
Lick Lick Blink was originally commissioned for The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Willoh collaborated with 120 people from the Older Women’s Network NSW to create a work that subverts the power of the male gaze in cinema through installation, film and the pleasure of ice-cream.
For Visions, originally presented at Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Willoh worked with 300 majority female, art gallery volunteers, re-contextualising their guide roles to function as seers and oracles to the collection.
Chant, commissioned for Mona Foma, was a collaboration with Tasmanian female and non-binary sporting groups to re-imagine historic and contemporary feminist protest chants as soundtracks to their routines.
Gift Trilogy at Contemporary Art Tasmania in 2023 was the first time these three works were shown together.
Willoh Weiland is the recipient of the two-year CAT residency (2023-2024).
Commissioning curators
Lick Lick Blink, The National (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art – Anna Davis and Clothilde Bullen
Visions, Adelaide Biennial of Australia Art (2020), Art Gallery of South Australia – Lee Robb
Chant, Mona Foma Festival (2023), Old Tafe Building Launceston – Emma Pike
Willoh Weiland is an artist, writer and curator. She works across art forms and is concerned with creating and realising epic impossible ideas. She is currently a Creative Director at the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics. From 2010-2018 she was Artistic Director/ CEO of the artist-led experimental arts organisation Aphids, leading a program of nationally and internationally acclaimed work. Recent commissioned works have been presented at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia and the National 2019, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. She is a recipient of the International Prize for Live Art from Anti-Festival and Saastamoinen Foundation Finland, an Australia Council Experimental Art Fellowship and numerous residencies including from the Asialink Foundation.