Exhibition floor talk | Far-away island
Loading...
Output Type
Other
Publication Title
Exhibition floor talk | Far-away island
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
School
School of Arts and Humanities; ECU Galleries
Description
Exhibition Statement | Far-Away Island is a fictional island inhabited by five ‘peoples’ (green, red, orange, blue and purple) living, working and travelling between the island’s five respective provinces. This series of paintings piece together a fragmented and non-linear story of interconnecting trade, industry and conflict. The island’s mythology integrates videogame tropes into my approach to painting as a storytelling medium. As such, this exhibition is conceived as a series of videogame screenshots that present a multiplicity of potential pathways, choices and determinations to follow. The exhibition emerged in response to my experiences of cross-cultural collaboration with local and international artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. These collaborations were prompted by a curiosity about cultural difference, as well as an interest in mythology and reverence for myth’s ability to shape people’s views, attitudes and beliefs. The contemporary mythology developed in Far-Away Island is directly informed by my encounters with plurality, incommensurability and divergence during cross-cultural collaboration through the period of my PhD research. To honour the collaborating artists who shared in encounters that directly informed specific works, their names feature in the extended titles of particular paintings—inspired by Francis Bacon’s 1953 painting, ‘Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’. The title of the exhibition is a reference to Australia as the culturally diverse, yet tension-filled, colonial context in which these collaborations took place. In this way, Far-Away Island is also a mythological response to contemporary Australia—its histories, geographies and communities—that explores notions of cultural identity, hybridity and tensions inherent to multiculturalist spaces.
Artist Bio | Harrison SEE is an arts researcher, contemporary painter and PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Humanities (SAH) at Edith Cowan University (ECU). During his PhD See pursued his interest in allegorical landscapes as a means to explore cultural divergence and plurality. Prior to Far-Away Island, he has undertaken six solo shows, six artist residencies and seven collaborative exhibitions, in Perth and Asia. See completed his Bachelor of Visual Arts at ECU in 2015 after receiving the ‘Louise Macfie Painting Prize’. In 2016 he was awarded a New Colombo Plan (NPC) scholarship that funded his honours research in Shanghai, China. After being awarded first class honours for this research, See extended his NPC funding and returned to China in 2017 for a three-month artist’s residency in Xiamen. In 2019 See was awarded a ‘Research Training Program Scholarship’ and returned to ECU to undertake his practice-led PhD research into dialogic cross-cultural collaboration. During See’s PhD research, he has published and/or co-published four conference papers, as well as acted as a facilitator for the interdisciplinary group TINAS (This Is Not A Seminar: Creative research dialogues), a SAH representative for the Vice Chancellor’s Student Advisory Forum and a HDR representative on the ECU Galleries committee. See has also been the co-recipient of; two SAH ‘Research Culture Grants’; a Department of Local Government Sport and Cultural Industries (DLGSC) ‘Arts U-15k’ grant; a Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) ‘Yagan Square Digital Tower Screen Initiative’ grant. See has also worked as a research assistant for SAH and the School of Education. Currently, he is a research assistant with the ECU node of the Australian Research Council (ARC) ‘Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child’, as well as a SAH tutor for ‘Storytelling and Meaning’.
Additional Information
Exhibition dates: 8 September to 6 October 2022 | Floor talk: 5 October 12:30pm–1:30pm