Small Gestures Big Prescence at Noosa Regional Gallery
Noosa Regional Gallery Director Michael Brennan encourages contemplation in the art of the small and sublime this winter.
It takes confidence and resolve for an artwork to hold a space. Even more so if that artwork is small in scale.
But the other thing that a small object asks you to do is to look carefully and closely. There’s an intimacy to small works that can be absent in larger gestures. They invite you into their space rather than spilling into yours. The Australian Ceramics Association is bringing a collection of petite pots and other small-scale ceramics to Noosa Regional Gallery this winter, drawn from the practices of their expansive membership base.
Titled Continuum, the exhibition sees a floating shelf trace a path around the perimeter of the Gallery, dotted with 89 works that draw you in close, then command attention once you’re there.
The repetition and the rhythm the installation creates as the collection of objects make a circuit around the space is a compelling visual experience of its own. You’re left with a sense of how many beautifully intimate objects there are in the world, each awaiting our discovery and attention, if only we give them the space and time.
Similarly, in the adjacent exhibition space, Melbourne-based painter, Fabrizio Biviano has amassed fifty small scale paintings of a common subject. The grey-scale depiction of roughly squeezed paint tubes, positioned like portraits in their individual picture planes, gather in one part of the Gallery, leaving the surrounding walls bare. These empty spaces, in turn, amplify the presence of the still lives clustered en masse.
At first there’s a self-similarity to the paintings that Biviano gives us – doppelganger depictions of tubes skilfully painted again and again. On closer inspection, the gifts of these works are in their individual titles – painted on the flat surface of each tube’s label, squeezed into subtly undulating 3D forms.
Names like Side Eye Green, Chlorine Haze and Guilty Pleasures lend a sinister tone to the otherwise ordinary objects. They draw into question what associations words bring to objects, in this case, metaphorically colouring the otherwise monochrome paint.
WHAT’S ON AT NOOSA REGIONAL ART GALLERY
20 June-12 July
IMAGINATE: Fields of Feelings
Artist Bonnie Hislop invites you to creatively explore your emotions and personal victories through clay, collage and drawing at Noosa Regional Gallery’s biennial children’s exhibition event, IMAGINATE. This exhibition is full of BIG emotions and tiny treasures. A place where all feelings belong and every emotion has a space to shine. $5 per entry, bookings essential. 18 July to 13 September
THE AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS ASSOCIATION – Continuum FABRIZIO BIVIANO – Colourful Language
Free entry.
Visit www.noosaregionalgallery.com.au for bookings, workshops and more or visit
Noosa Regional Gallery
9 Pelican Street Tewantin
Discover more of the talent from our diverse region…
