Curator

FERNANDO DO CAMPO

Artists

RICHARD BELL

JON CATTAPAN

JUAN DAVILA

KERRY GREGAN

RAAFAT ISHAK

PENNY MASON

ALEX PITTENDRIGH

JESSICA RANKIN

JUDY WATSON

MEGAN WALCH

RUTH WALLER

Date: 19-Mar-2017 – 28-Jan-2018

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

Landscape can be defined through the history of painting and Australia alike. Ideas of the pastoral and the natural are commonly depicted as picture-postcard perfect – sublime and transcendent – and emptied of human beings. This is how we still think of landscape. Often gone unseen, the colonial lens prevails. A decolonial geographic recalibrates this idealised and Romantic view of what landscape signifies and how it should be portrayed.

There exist new philosophical and pictorial models through which to think about our presence on the planet. While the work of these eleven artists may not be commonly associated with the genre of landscape, their practices palpably engage with the personal, cultural and social narratives of the Australian terrain. Their work stays in the grey zone; remaining in the borders between different forms of being in the landscape. The sites we really inhabit are human-centric environments; colonised, gendered, political, re-mobilised, and filled with language, abstractions and surveillance. The work of these artists highlight the colonial hang-ups that often go unnoticed in the way Australia is represented and perceived. These artists make us aware of the human footprint. In so doing, they introduce a new lexicon for the genre of landscape.

Devonport Regional Gallery 18 March – 30 April 2017

Plimsoll Gallery, School of Creative Arts, Hunter St, Hobart 16 December 2017 – 28 January 2018