Pushing the Boundaries at Noosa Regional Gallery
Noosa Regional Gallery Director Michael Brennan engages local artists to push the boundaries of a popular medium in the hopes of producing a blockbuster sequel that will really paint the town.
They say that the sequel is rarely as good as the original. But there are, of course, exceptions. Take The Godfather: Part II, for example. Or Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Aliens is another. There’s even some debate around in what order the various Back to the Futures should be ranked. There are always deviations from the rule.
And the thing is, the sequel usually features a number of the key cast from the first showing.
Our summer show at Noosa Regional Gallery has no repeat performers (that is, if you don’t include me – and it has been said that my appearance is getting more and more like Doc Emmett Brown’s as time marches on in the only direction we currently have available to us).
Earlier in the year, the gallery put together an exhibition tilted simply ‘PAINT’, which took a snapshot of younger and emerging artists embracing painting in their practices here on the Sunshine Coast.
That might not seem like such a remarkable thing to many, however at a time when art schools often prioritise ideas over mastery of a medium; when digital technologies are so prevalent in our everyday lives that we take them for granted; not to mention that everyone is carrying around a camera in their pocket capable of shooting both moving and still images of exhibition quality, these artists have been building their work by placing the analogue and the tactile process of applying paint to canvas at the centre of what they do.
But the other thing that was interesting about this group of artists, was how diverse and different their approaches to painting were. It got me thinking – how far can you push the medium of paint and still call what is being made, ‘painting’?
Does it matter – maybe not (and probably not to the artists we’ve brought together for our summer exhibition). But when we push things to their limit, it helps us understand what’s important about them, what makes them quintessentially part of a certain type of thing, and importantly, often says as much about ourselves as the thing we’re trying to pigeonhole.
So we’ve gone in for a sequel. A Bit More Paint again brings together six artists who take painting and push it to places that don’t typically jump to mind when you talk about the medium.
Alex Lange, Alicia Sharples, BJ Murphy, Casey Hewitt, Pippa Makgill and Thom Stuart steer painting into different spaces, times and dimensions, asking us to reassess our assumptions about what painting could and should be. There’s sculpture, street art, animation and neon – all employed in the aid of paint.
There’s no doubt that the original Back to the Future was an era-defining classic. But without the sequel, we couldn’t have dreamed up the possibility of hoverboards. Who doesn’t want one of them?!
