Curator

Lisa Campbell-Smith

Date: 01-May-2015

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

Join Tender Exotics curator Lisa Campbell-Smith in the gallery before the exhibition opening for an informal talk on the curatorial themes and work on display.

Tender Exotics presents an international selection of works on paper from across two centuries revealing an expansive range of aesthetics and intentions. Botanical drawings, originally serving as pedagogical tools for scientific research, are contrasted with highly imaginative works from underground figures.

Nik Kamvissis (New South Wales, AUS) melds a kind of primitive surrealism with folklore perversity within imagery that has at its source a more specifically graphic tradition in record cover illustration and design. Bobby Beausoleil (California, US) is an artist and composer who has been producing artworks whilst serving a life sentence for murder. Often anthropomorphic, Beausoleil’s images represent mans struggle with ego, nature, and spirituality. Eminent Australian botanical artist Margaret Stones (Victoria, AUS) was the principal illustrator for the six-volume botanical publication The Endemic Flora of Tasmania which is often described as one of the foremost botanical publications of the twentieth century. The exhibition also includes adaptations of designs by 18th Century Scottish botanist, garden and cemetery designer, John Claudius Loudon re-appropriated and reproduced by Alan Townsend (Tasmania, AUS) who creates wallpaper from these schematics using traditional silk-screening methods.

Within this exhibition, Campbell-Smith endeavours to challenge and unsettle the classification of images in a contemporary art institutional context through this unique integration. The re-contextualisation of work by these disparate artists asks the viewer to interrogate their own ideas of authorship and artistic value.

TIME: 5.30pm (exhibition opening 6pm)

A FREE EVENT