Gambit Lines
presented new work by Carolyn Mckenzie-Craig
in 2016 at BOSZ Gallery, Fortitude Valley

This show continues an investigation into gestural and linguistic typologies that are instrumental in sustaining positions of power. Gestures are deconstructed using performance and drawing rituals that are framed within a self referencing notion of parody.

'Living in the subject body means living within certain parameters. Our bodyminds are restricted by learned behaviour, both intentional and unintentional, due to the influence of cultural normativity. Through the white noise of culture’s codifications, we forget that we exist in a naturally fluid space with potential to be explored.

“Please do not sit like that.”

This idea of normativity is used to define our positions both within ourselves and society at large, and seeps into us in ways often unnoticed. When cultural normativity turns bad, people and their behaviours are classified, restricted, catalogued, stereotyped, deemed unacceptable or unattractive, and objectified, in ways that inherently exclude some, and privilege others. Cultural normativity means drawing lines and forming categories that are arbitrary in an inherently fluid space, in order to assert control.

Instead of using the line to control, Carolyn Mackenzie-Craig uses the drawn line to render such categories fluid again, specifically in relation to genders’ social inscription on her own identity. In repeating daily gendered movements over and over, she kinaesthetically deconstructs them. She uses these tools to identify where there is room to move, and to what extent these categories hold power over her. With repetition within constraints, micro-differences appear that exist outside of fixed knowledge. This is her entry point into codified structure from a fluid perspective, where new meanings can be created or discovered: the grey area where identity is still free.'

Marissa Georgiou

Jonathan Tse: The Collector
was exhibited in 2016 at the WEBB Gallery, Quensland College of Art .

Jonathan Tse’s contribution to Australian fine arts is being celebrated at Queensland College of Art’s Webb Gallery this August 3 – 16. Included in the exhibition is his nationally acclaimed artists book Immigrant. This work reflects the broader concerns of Tse’s practice, one that address the complexities immigrants are confronted with in an adopted homeland. Elements of the exhibition take the form of a bower bird’s bower, the common denominator of which we are never quite confident we can identify. In a highly sophisticated use of printmaking techniques and bricolage Tse layers objects and images that draw out insoluble tensions of difference within cultural ephemera. These artworks highlight that to every action of relocation and insertion there is an equal and opposite reaction. In learning to read and write in English Tse lost reading and writing in Chinese, the language of his formative years. There is, threading through all this work, an unquestionable quality that bonds Tse to his adopted home; humour salves the tensions this quiet achiever has so capably navigated.

Tim Mosely

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Jonathan Tse is an artist, printmaker and maker of artists books of national standing. He has worked in the print rooms at QCA for more than twenty years. In doing so he has made a fundamental contribution to the creative outputs of so many staff and students who have developed their printmaking practice at QCA. Jonathan’s survey exhibition The Collector (see Exhibitions listing, also reviewed by Tim Mosely below) is now showing concurrently with Waiting for Jonathan – a tribute curated/coordinated by Russell Craig and Elyse Edmonds.

Paul Wright | GCCAR

books by artists
was exhibited in 2015 at QCA's WEBB Gallery
in conjunction with abbe 2015

the exhibiting artists were

Isaac Brown
Blogger_dad
Victoria Cooper
Caroline McKenzie-Craig
Fiona Dempster
Hesam Fetrati
Angela Gardner
Annique Goldenberg
Alannah Gunter
Institute of Modern Art
Cassandra Lehman-Schultz
Alison Mackay
Judy Macklin
Heather Mathew
Tess Mehonoshen
Christine Mellor
Tim Mosely
the Night Ladder Collective
Naomi O’Reill
       Adele Outteridge
Rose Rigley
Mona Ryder
Glen Skien
Doug Spowart
Wim De Vos