Artists

ERIN LINHART

LOLA PAGE

EMILY PARSONS-LORD

DEXTER ROSENGRAVE

ELISSA WILSON

Curator

EVA NILSSEN

Date: 04-May-2019 – 26-May-2019

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

OPENING: 6pm, Friday 3 May 2019

CURATED BY EVA NILSSEN FOR THE 2019 CAT CURATORIAL MENTORSHIP

We live in the Anthropocene. What this really means is an ongoing question, but it is clear that human activity is now the defining characteristic of this geological era. There is both power and helplessness in acknowledging the breadth of human influence over the planet; as individuals we struggle to make sense of what our complicity and agency means in terms of everyday actions.

With every purchase, every mouthful, and every car ride, we are driving the industrial processes that threaten our future survival as a species. When authoring artistic work about the overwhelming power and simultaneous helplessness that characterises our contemporary relationship with nature, it is perhaps more important to find a way of thinking that makes sense of our engagement.

Five artists offer perspectives on our predicament as both destroyers and saviours of our world. Their works admit guilt but also try to offer a way through it, to a space where we can live with the terror, the strangeness, and the beauty of the Anthropocene. ⁣⁣

“Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collaborative work and play with other terrains, flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that include people will be possible.” (Donna Harraway 2015)