Lines of Negotiation I

A Trio of Trespassers

by Maitland Regional Gallery, NSW, Australia http://mrag.org.au/exhibition/a-trio-of-trespassers-annemarie-murland-andy-devine-kiera-otoole/ "A trio of Trespassers is an exhibition which alludes to the notion of dis-placement as an evolving and dissolving metaphor in the production of making art. Transforming in its nature, dis-placement finds form through each artists’s experience of migration as a concept, which reassesses the iconography of the Australian landscape as a means of identity to explore a renewed send of place from the position of ‘other’. The variety of each artist’s individual approach to finding ‘material form’ forecasts a fascinating inspiring, interdisciplinary visual response that explores praxis through the fusion of transient histories. It is from a position of structured opposition towards an inherent imperialist perspective that new visual conversation develop between artists, materials, time and space.

Lines of Inquiry: marking time and place, Maitland Regional Gallery, NSW, Australia
 
The artist as researcher is a term familiar to Annemarie Murland and Kiera OToole, who as professional artists and scholars use their art practice as a research methodology. Each artist has approached this project, entitled Lines of Inquiry: marking time and place from a perspective of materials matter, which critically examines contemporary drawings legitimacy as a field of study. As valid artistic tenor the works are interdisciplinary in their execution, creating a material dialogue through process and the use of multiple domains. As an exhibition these works showcase and negotiate the space of representation and challenge the characteristics and materiality of drawing to push it beyond its history and traditions. 
 
At the centre of each artist’s art practice is the need to find form and inform through thinking in as much as it is through doing. As personal stories of discovery, the studio specific drawings in this exhibition challenge established notions of what is drawing. By engaging in visual methodologies, Murland and OToole explore the evolving process and practice of drawing through the act of drawing itself. Attention is paid to the experimental, sensory and subjectivity of drawing to extend its conventions as a medium and to create an open view of drawing. Observing or looking at these works invites the viewer to experience drawing within an expanded field that is by definition in a state of unfolding. Dr Annemarie Murland

 

Lines of Negotiation I
Trio of Tresspassers
by Dr Darryl Bowes

The proposed travelling exhibition, A Trio of Trespassers ‘examines some of the complex phenomena central to the act of migration’.[1] Annemarie Murland, Andy Devine and Kiera O’Toole are new ‘Australian’s’ whose art practices explore the experience of migration and its subsequent diasporas. Navigating between here and there, present and past, inside and out, praxis explores a fusion of transient histories.  In their approaches to finding ‘material form’ the Trio’s visual observations are panoramic. Lying between identity and landscape, their tableaus converge as one, rather than from an inherited imperialist, cultural perspective. By reassessing displaced identities, Murland, Devine and O’Toole recreate representations that are transformative in their critique of cultural and social otherness in relation to terra australis.  The resolve of the Trio is a contemporary visual response, which serves to renegotiate the enduring loss that is inherent to the evolving and dissolving experiences of migration. As the work travels between space and place, new identities are forged and geographical borders are reassessed, forecasting an inspiring and interdisciplinary material outcome.
[1] Darryl, Bowes, A Trio of Trespassers, Catalogue Essay of Exhibition: The University of Newcastle, Australia, 16 October – 1 November, 2010. 1

Lines of Negotiation II, 2014,

Steambox, Dublin

by Irish Museum of Contemporary Art


"In 2010, IMOCA established a new opportunity for local artists in honour of a similar pursuit taken up by artists many years ago. In 1943, a group of artists rebelling at the closed, conservative, ‘tennis club’ institutions for art, decided to stand together and do something about it. The Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which was arguably sparked the atmosphere that allowed many or most of the opportunities available to Irish-based artists today- The Arts Council, Culture Ireland and the Percent For Art scheme, among others. The very nature of contemporary art has changed so much since the declaration of the name, ‘Living Art,’ that a current reading of it could easily confuse it as just performance-based work, although it originally was a reference to the simple fact that these artists were still living and producing work. By its dissolution in the 1980’s, The Irish Exhibition of Living Art had already exhibited a significant force on Irish art, and had successfully managed what many institutions fail to do- make way for newer memes and ideas. In 2010 the first New Living Art exhibition was launched,  and included over 30 Irish artists. It was a celebration of, and a bridge between, the artists of the past who had the courage and drive to create their own opportunities when presented with no other alternative, and the artists who, today, are taking every opportunity that is now available.