Urban Suburban. Canberra Museum and Gallery, London Circuit, Civic. Until June 21.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Promoted as an exhibition selected as "a celebration of the lived experience of the Canberra region", Urban Suburban is quite a large show of 104 disparate works by 32 artists, all made in the Canberra region between the 1960s and the present. All are from the collection of the Canberra Museum and Gallery.
Although many of the individual items in the show are quite outstanding and memorable, the exhibition as a whole lacks a unifying theme and in some ways it could be described as a show in search of a purpose. What are we being told of the lived experience in Canberra?
If I recall correctly, it was in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s that the evocatively called Bitumen River Gallery (which later morphed into the Canberra Contemporary Art Space) published a journal on arts in Canberra titled Unreal City.
Some of the leading lights involved in this venture included eX de Medici, Stephanie Radok and Neil Roberts. As the title suggested, Canberra was interpreted not so much as a waste of a good sheep paddock (a common view from outside the city), but as a place of surreal unreality. So what has changed in the intervening couple of decades?
After the "sturm und drang" of the centenary celebrations, has Canberra managed to progress any further in its self-identification? Probably not, according to this exhibition with the usual references to the "bush capital," the nation's capital and as a place where normal Australians live. The show has a number of nice corners, where certain pieces are juxtaposed, rather than a strong unifying theme or a central guiding intelligence. For example, Rachel Bowak's welded stainless steel domestic utensils are nicely matched with Julian Laffan's inked woodblocks of toolshed implements.
Neil Roberts' By the Pattern of a Snowflake is a piece which grows on you with repeated viewings, where the whirling structure made up of garden rakes brings together wit and boldness of concept to create a strange emblem or logo for life in Canberra.
Also the bringing together of Ingo Kleinert, David Watt, Vivienne Binns with the early Queanbeyan watercolours of Mandy Martin from the 1970s is an effective trip down memory lane. There is a conscious echo of the suburban past – the way we were – from which we now have established a historical distance. However there is little in this exhibition which speaks of Canberra's zeitgeist in the second decade of the 21st century. Toni Robinson's deliberately garish screenprints brilliantly evoke the unreality of the business as usual mentality of the early 1980s Canberra and it would be good to have works which evoke the mood of the present. Robert Boynes can be nominated as a possible candidate. There is reference to street art and graffiti in the catalogue essay, but none of this thriving subculture has made it into the exhibition itself.
One could be forgiven in thinking that this is an exhibition in search of a purpose for a city in search of a heart. This is a rather out-of-date view of Canberra which does not ring true today.