MAIN and FOYER GALLERIES
Interconnection
Warwick Artist Group
3 September to 24 October 2020
In February 2019, The Warwick Artists Group was pleased to be invited to play a part in the Warwick Art Gallery’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations. It goes without saying that the Gallery’s program to mark this special milestone was overtaken somewhat by world events.
Over the past years, our community has faced many setbacks and struggled, with courage, to combat the devastating effects of prolonged drought and lately, bushfires. Now the year 2020 has brought new challenges, ones we would never have imagined. This exhibition and its important theme of gathering, meeting, and coming together has increased in significance over the past months. Once this crisis is over, the ties that help bind our little community together will be more crucial and we regroup and refocus our efforts towards healing.
Participation in creative pursuits, particularly when we meet with friends to share common interests and learn from each other, helps focus our minds in a positive way that can help us take a break from more serious issues. Our regional gallery plays an integral part in the creative life of our community and provides us with a meeting place that connects artists, visitors, and local groups. It invites us to engage with the visual arts, and sometimes challenges our perceptions.
The theme agreed by our participants is COMMUNITY and the title of the work is INTERCONNECTION.
For rural communities like ours, INTERCONNECTION suggests linkages, networks, interdependence and relationships, the essence of community, it also describes a connection to place and to the natural environment.
Apart from individual works to be hung in the main gallery, the Warwick Artists Group made plans to produce a larger work that would be a collaboration of interested members and friends. After some discussion we chose to make an installation that could be displayed on the long wall of the Gallery foyer, the design of which would allow for individual contribution, but at the same time form its own narrative.
The structure consists of several interconnected boxes of varying sizes. Each contain an individual work that tells its own story. Our theme provided our artists with enough scope for individual interpretation using any medium, either pictorial or abstract. Contributors used mixed media, incorporating their own painted, printed, or three-dimensional work, and included collage, ephemera and found objects. These became assemblages, or dioramas within the box frame.
The Warwick Artists Group acknowledge the help of community and would like to thank:
• The Warwick Art Gallery for their support, and…
• The Warwick Men’s Shed for their expertise in construction of the boxes…we could not have done it without them, and…
• Highways and Byways: (A Community of Service in the Spirit of the Missionary Sisters of Service and Fr John Wallis) for their contribution towards the funding of the materials used in our installation, and…
Images:
Recovery - Maryvale Queensland Helen Robinson Photograph on metalic paper
Granite Beauty Judy Currie Watercolour on Arches hot press 300gsm
ORANGE WALL GALLERY
In Sight 3
Visual Art Students from Warwick State High School
27 August to 3 October 2020
Insight provokes a deeper reflection on what it means to be creative. Warwick High School students share what is meaningful to them through their artworks.
Official Opening: Friday 28 August at 5.30pm
Public Programs: to be advised
Image: Subjective Perspective Madison Rowan Mixed Media on Canvas
"Today’s generation has a tendency where they unintentionally attempt to dodge ugly truths while subconsciously seeking out something that helps distract them from this truth. This was demonstrated to me through an experience at Glengallan homestead where my peers saw and acknowledged the history within the cracks and holes in the walls, yet they concentrated on the beautiful, renovated areas. I attempted to capture this in a much larger scale, bringing in modern, societal problems, reflecting this in my artwork, Subjective Perspective."
