Mandy Quadrio is a Trawlwoolway woman, connected to her ancestral Country of Tebrakunna, north-east Lutruwita/Tasmania, and the Laremairremener Country of Little Swanport, Oyster Bay Nation of eastern Lutruwita. She is also of European heritage. Her exhibition’s title, Kukunna Murraweena, translates as ‘holding the weight of silence’. Featuring womblike, steel-wool sculptures and Quadrio’s first moving-image work, we are presented with an exhibition that communes with the past, despite colonialist attempts to scrub her and her people away.
Erika Scott is known for her maximalist sculptures of detritus. Cambium Itch takes the form of a supersized ‘pin-art toy’, the sensory device designed by artist Ward Fleming in 1976. Scott scales up the sensory experience of the toy and the impressions it creates, filling the gallery with so-called junk: PVC pipes, plastic tubing, chair upholstery, lamps, and other hard-rubbish jetsam. Scott takes the junk of consumer culture and transforms it into a sensual explosion, exciting its haptic qualities, and collapsing boundaries between object, image, and viewer.
Cartoon Violence brings together two 3D animations—by American artists Takeshi Murata and Bunny Rogers—that grapple with the coded, gendered violence that defines the ultimate American cultural product, the cartoon. Murata’s I, Popeye (2010) turns the eponymous sailor man into a crudely 3D-rendered subject suffering an existential crisis. Rogers’s Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) is haunted by the spectre of the Columbine High School shooting, mediating on the aftermath of male violence, and how a traumatic event might poison an entire generation.
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