Long fascinated by the air, Argentinian-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno has created a major new commission — a mesmerising suspended installation — Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms 2022 (illustrated). You can experience Saraceno’s constellation of 15 floating mirrored spheres in the central atrium at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane during the exhibition ‘Air’. The exhibition asks us to consider the air we share with all other life, and to reflect on what it means to breathe freely.
Saraceno’s Drift engages the poetic and imaginative potential of air. The spheres are part transparent and part reflective; some float above the viewer at different heights moving gently as if breathing, while others float in apparent stillness. As they catch and refract the light, they remind us of the complex dynamics of the air we rely on.
The installation Drift expands on Saraceno’s earlier works based on infrared radiation balloons launched into the upper reaches of the atmosphere by the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Paris, where he was artist‑in‑residence in 2012. The artist explains:
The sculptures, made of two different lightweight materials, are experimental models and chart a path towards sustainable human flight technologies. In the world, the mirrored section would reflect the Sun’s radiation, controlling the temperature inside, preventing overheating during the day. The transparent part helps to maintain the temperature inside the envelope during the night and hence its buoyancy. It holds the infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface — the solar heat the planet accumulates over a day. Drawing just enough heat, but not too much, would enable a fluctuating trajectory, a floating choreography in the air, free from fossil fuels, powered only by the thermodynamics of the planet.
Working across the fields of science, engineering, art, philosophy and community organising, in 2015 Saraceno founded the Aerocene Foundation, inviting us to join him in a new era which he calls the ‘Aerocene’. As he says:
The international Aerocene community calls for a different way of living independent from fossil fuels. More deeply attuned to our environment, new infrastructures are imagined through the process of working in collaboration with each other, our ecologies and the atmosphere we rely on.
Watch: Take a peek at the exhibition ‘Air’
Expansive and inspiring, ‘Air’ at GOMA — presented across the entire ground floor — showcases more than 30 significant Australian and international artists, reflecting the vitality of our shared atmosphere.
Edited extract from the accompanying exhibition publication Air available at the QAGOMA Store and online.
‘Air’ / Gallery of Modern Art, Gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery), Gallery 1.2 & Gallery 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) / 26 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Connected lengths of duct punctuated by vents crisscross a room in the exhibition ‘Air’ currently at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane. Up close, it becomes clear the network is channelling air as the turbine ventilators spin and comes to life as a breathing system, wondrous for its unexpected industrial intrusion into the gallery.
First conceived in 1985, Nancy Holt’s Ventilation System 1985–92 (illustrated) belongs to Holt’s ‘System Works’; site-specific artworks that make visible the extensive hidden infrastructure we rely on for our everyday existence. These works are fabricated from the standard components of each industrial system and become a sculptural form in themselves.
No longer hidden, the steel contortions of Ventilation System make visible the ducted air that already circulates, almost imperceptibly, throughout our built environment. During her lifetime, Holt took care to tie the work closely to any existing ventilation systems within a building, following their logic and continuing the impression of air flow: ‘I intend the work to be practical yet playful, functional yet not really necessary, a part of the architecture yet part of the outdoor environment as well’.1
The QAGOMA variation for the exhibition ‘Air’ is the second posthumous presentation of Ventilation System, its site-responsiveness requiring some extrapolation of the artist’s ideas within the parameters she established for the work during her lifetime. The early environmental consciousness that shaped the ‘System Works’ from their conception in 1982 remains key, however, and is consistent with Nancy Holt’s belief that:
while continuing to meet our immediate material needs, the channelling of energy and elements of the earth can be done intelligently with the long‑term benefit of the planet in mind. In doing so we become nature’s agents rather than nature’s aggressors.2
Endnote 1 Nancy Holt, quoted in Joan Marter, ‘Systems – A conversation with Nancy Holt’, Sculpture, October 2013, vol.32, no.8, p.31. 2 Holt, quoted in Pamela M Lee, ‘Art as a social system: Nancy Holt and the second-order observer’, in Williams, p.56.
Edited extract from the accompanying exhibition publication Air available at the QAGOMA Store and online.
Behind-the-scenes: Installation of ‘Ventilation System’
‘Air’ / Gallery of Modern Art, Gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery), Gallery 1.2 & Gallery 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) / 26 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Cloud Chamber 2020 (illustrated) by Yhonnie Scarce is based upon the form of a rising atomic cloud after a devastating nuclear blast. Currently on display at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane during the exhibition ‘Air’, the hand-blown yam shapes in glass hang in the air like inverted raindrops capturing the light.
Whereas clouds usually signal rain on Kokatha and Nukunu artist Scarce’s desert Country in South Australia, this unsettled cumulus suggests something less welcome — a toxic plume raining poison on the land. Cloud Chamber was conceived as a memorial in response to the British nuclear tests conducted at Maralinga, South Australia, between 1953 and 1963. Drawing on historical photographs, Scarce communicates the virulent force of the airborne radiation which had a devastating impact on her people.
The glass yams refer to traditional bush foods that could no longer sustain Aboriginal communities in the scarred earth of the bombs’ aftermath. Suspended and inert, they bear a haunting resemblance to brutalised organs.
Scarce’s use of glass connects vitally to Country. Silica in the desert sand, melted by the intense heat of the blasts, turns to glass. Heated and shaped by the artist’s breath, this is a medium she returns to frequently, finding in its lightness, clarity and transparency the qualities necessary for truth-telling.
Edited extract from the accompanying exhibition publication Air available at the QAGOMA Store and online.
Expansive and inspiring, ‘Air’ at GOMA — presented across the entire ground floor — showcases more than 30 significant Australian and international artists, reflecting the vitality of our shared atmosphere.
‘Air’ / Gallery of Modern Art, Gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery), Gallery 1.2 & Gallery 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) / 26 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Everything in The air lock on display in the exhibition ‘Air’ at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane, has some relation to the idea of air, it’s like a giant puzzle, inviting us to consider how the invisible subject ‘air’ can be held in a myriad of ways. Patrick Pound is an avid collector, he gathers artworks from both his own collection and, for this work, QAGOMA’s holdings.
Pound collects and categorises. Mostly, he buys old photographs and objects online that he arranges in chains or constellations of common meaning. Holiday snapshots, bronze sculptures, toys and famous paintings: ‘They’re all treated equally’, he states, ‘which is not to say that the objects have equal value’. For the game he proposes to work, the assorted objects must be given a ‘sabbatical’ from their usual task.
‘I’ve always liked the idea of capturing something you can’t see, or trying to come to terms with it, come to grips with it’, says Pound. A subject such as air must be grasped through the involvement of other, more concrete images and objects.
Edited extract from the accompanying exhibition publication Air available at the QAGOMA Store and online.
Watch: Take a peek at the exhibition ‘Air’
Expansive and inspiring, ‘Air’ at GOMA — presented across the entire ground floor — showcases more than 30 significant Australian and international artists, reflecting the vitality of our shared atmosphere.
‘Air’ / Gallery of Modern Art, Gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery), Gallery 1.2 & Gallery 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) / 26 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Wutan #2 2014 (illustrated) depicts a specific tract of land and its waterways in the Cape York region, Far North Queensland, leading to a site of significance to Mavis Ngallametta (1944–2019) — a sister work to Ngak-pungarichan (Clearwater) 2013 (illustrated). This large portrait-format landscape uses its height to chart a tract of land and water, from tiny inland streams through to wild rivers and rivulets, to the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where Wutan — an historically, culturally and personally significant site — sits at the mouth of the Archer River.
Wutan’s position at the mouth of one of the Cape’s great wild rivers ensured a rich hunting and story place for the local Wik and Kugu people. It was also the site of a radar station established by the Royal Australian Air Force in 1943, and locals have related stories of Japanese submarines entering the Archer River at this site. Many local men joined the Australian Armed Forces, working alongside their Torres Strait Islander neighbours in the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion to protect the maritime borders of far north Queensland.
But for Ngallametta, Wutan has significance as a site of personal interaction — during the mission time, the school children would camp there. It is also her adopted son Edgar’s country, and he has moved back to manage the area. Ngallametta has said:
[Wutan] is my adopted son Edgar’s traditional place. He built a little shed there, it is a nice fishing place. For me it takes me right back to the time when I used to go here on school holiday. And I still go there now often. Even my friends who I take there enjoy it. Still today we like to go to that place, camping, fishing. There used to be a big coconut plantation. There is a well with fresh water. It is still there. That’s what we used to water the coconuts with. There used to be a boys dormitory where the point is a little further. We used to go schooling there when they were building the dormitories in Aurukun. We use to go to Amban, and then cross the river in dugout canoes. On Saturdays they used to bring us the rations. There were also lots of mango trees. There is one left now, a new shoot from the old days by the well. There were lots of banana trees, too. Every Sunday we swapped: People from Aurukun came and the ones at Wutan went back to Aurukun.1
The sprawling landscape Ngak-pungarichen (Clearwater) 2013 is dominated by browns and bauxite red fields, cut by lines of stark white pigment and depicts a special site in the artist’s Kugu country. And so it has been with Ngallametta’s painting career — her unorthodox and highly idiosyncratic paintings, bustling with energy and life have seen her achieve a distinguished place among the top contemporary Australian painters a mere seven years after first putting paintbrush to canvas. Previously, Ngallametta was renowned as one of the Cape’s great weavers; like other senior Aboriginal weavers who have turned to painting relatively late in life, her works have a rhythmic linear complexity, evocative of her longer established cultural practices.
Edited extract from Bruce Johnson McLean, former Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA
Endnote 1 Artist statement provided for the 2014 Telstra NATSIAA, published online at <http://www.natsiaa31.nt.gov.au/view-artwork/6/448>, accessed 11 February 2015.
Wutan #2 can be viewed as part of the Gallery’s Australian art display in Galleries 10, 11, 12 & 13 (Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries) Queensland Art Gallery.
Acknowledgment of Country The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
What do you associate with the term still life? Is it highly detailed, and realistic painted images of flower bouquets and tables laden with lavish bowls of fruit and game from a time past? Yes, the still life genre uses inanimate objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables, and manufactured items to symbolically reflect on nature, wealth, exploration and mortality, however at present, the still life is a space for creative experimentation exploring issues of consumerism, beauty, power, postcolonialism and gender politics.
Artists have pushed the boundaries of the genre from painting and sculpture into the realms of photography, performance and new media. These works currently on display in ‘Still Life Now‘ at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane until 19 February, use strategies of repetition, appropriation and transformation to reflect or reject the concerns of traditional still lifes — such as the memento mori (a stoic visual reminder of the inevitability of death) and the vanitas still life (the use of elaborate spreads to highlight life’s transience) — to reconsider the genre in the current era of image production.
Michael Cook ‘Nature Morte (Blackbird)’
Nature Morte (Blackbird), from Michael Cook’s ‘Natures Mortes’ series, draws on visual strategies affiliated with the still‑life genre — particularly the memento mori, a visual reminder of the inevitability of death — to highlight the devastating impact of colonisation from an Indigenous point of view. Here, the black cockatoos symbolise the inhuman practices that were present in the Australian sugar industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work’s title refers to ‘blackbirding’, a type of entrapment used to capture and transport South Sea Islander people to Australia as indentured labour to service the burgeoning cane fields and sugar industries. The wilted flowers mourn the cruelty of this practice, with the set of scales resembling a cross-like figure that marks the countless deaths of First Nations peoples.
Moving between the beautiful and the macabre, Justine Cooper’s ‘Saved by science’ series explores the human fascination with collection and preservation. Offering a glimpse into the 32 million specimens held in the cabinets and vaults of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Cooper draws particular attention to the multiple, demonstrating how the collected animals are assigned value en masse during the process of scientific interrogation. Unlike still lifes that draw attention to the cycle of life and the certainty of death, Cooper’s photographs demonstrate the ability of science to defy death through the superficial suspension of life.
The photograph Possum with five birds echoes the tone of paintings made in the still‑life tradition to explore contemporary relations to native animals killed through the expansion of urbanisation in Australia. The animals featured — destroyed either by introduced predators, land-clearing, urban development or as roadkill — are then collected by Drew and placed alongside embroidered fabrics, fine china, candles, fruits and vegetables. By positioning the animals amongst these domestic objects, the space between the human world and the animal world is reduced; emphasising the ethical responsibility that humans have to the animals that share our environments. In this still life arrangement, they remind us of the cost of urbanisation to wild animals and of humans’ ever-changing relationship with nature.
Renowned for creating artworks that explore the dilemmas of human existence, Damien Hirst’s For the love of God, laugh rebels against mortality by transforming the human skull into a glittering object of desire. Coated with diamond dust, the print depicts Hirst’s sculptural work For the Love of God 2007, a platinum cast of an eighteenth‑century skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds. A familiar motif in memento mori still lifes, the skull is a haunting symbol of contemplation and foreboding. Our attention is drawn to its smile – the real human teeth the only part of the work not covered by diamonds – bringing a sardonic humour and sense of contempt that suggests victory over decay.
In the ‘Yam dreaming’ series of paintings, Emily Kame Kngwarreye uses vibrant colours to trace the meandering root systems of Arlatyeye (pencil yam or bush potato) as they forge their way through the Simpson Desert. Kngwarreye’s paintings emphasise the significance of Arlateye as an essential provider of food and sustenance, as well as the subject of significant ceremonies amongst Eastern Anmatyerre people. Rather than simply observing or recording the material properties of Arlatyeye, Kngwarreye integrates her own ancestral knowledge into these paintings to create vivid compositions.
Deborah Kelly’s vibrant collage animation Beastliness presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the future. Featuring a cast of hybrid creatures created from the pages of obsolete encyclopaedias, textbooks and natural history magazines, Kelly uses the scaffolds of old scientific knowledge to create an alternative reality free from the constraints of heteronormativity. The work, which invokes a wild sense of sexual liberation and hedonism, also features symbolic representations of fertility and reproduction (such as nests of spinning eggs) that celebrate the corporeal magic of birth and rebirth.
In his paintings, Robert MacPherson often uses appropriated language and images encountered in daily life to reflect upon what constitutes a work of art. Featuring imagery and lettering taken from hand-painted road signage found on regional highways throughout Australia, MacPherson’s ‘Mayfair’ series of works uses the still life as a platform to elevate mundane road signs from a position of low to high art. Referencing pop art and the readymade, “MAYFAIR: 4,4JOE BIRCH” 1999 reveals MacPherson’s approach to the depiction of multiples — sequences of similar or identical objects – that highlight the connection of the still life to money, manufacture and trade.
Kimiyo Mishima skilfully recreates throwaway objects — such as newspapers, drink cans and cardboard boxes — as highly realistic hand-painted ceramics. Work 21 – C4 (C for ‘cans’) speaks to the tradition of the still life to painstakingly capture the everyday, but draws attention to the disposable nature of manmade products. In her work, Mishima uses a valuable and fragile ceramic medium to elevate the value and status of the objects and rally against wasteful overconsumption.
Dead Bee Portrait #1 is from a series of photographs by Anne Noble that highlight the threat of human development on the insect world. Created from electron microscope images of dead bees, the exaggeration of the bee’s scale almost reanimates it, creating an ethereal portrait of a species on the brink of extinction. The necessary gilding of the dead bee in gold dust — to allow viewing under the microscope – reflects the still‑life tradition of using aesthetically seductive materials and ornamentation to draw attention to the fragility of life. Noble’s photographs show that the image can not only capture the physical composition of once‑living things, but also emphasises the ability of the photographic surface to offer experiences of form, time, memory and being.
Using cans, bottles, cartons and plastic containers bought in Indonesian supermarkets, Edwin Roseno’s ‘Green hypermarket (series)’ works capture everyday objects to highlight human connections to commercial products and plant life. The photographs show a series of plants in discarded product containers, collected by Roseno from friends, neighbours and local nurseries. Although the work draws attention to environmental and economic tensions that are prevalent across the growing economies of Asia, the images are also nostalgic, alluding to the local customs lost in the face of rapid urbanisation and mass consumerism.
Victoria Wareham is Assistant Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA and Curator of ‘Still Life Now’.
‘Still Life Now’ / Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / 24 September 2022 until 19 February 2023
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We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
