Image credit: Alison Bennett, vegetal / digital (Waratah), 2021, Still of photogrammetry pointcloud.
Manning Regional Art Gallery is pleased to present POSTWORLD, a national touring exhibition co-curated by Kate O'Hara and Daniel Qualischefski of Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville, commissioned by the North Australian Festival of Arts (NFA) and toured by Museums & Galleries Queensland.
Opening Friday 14 March 2025, POSTWORLD will be displayed at Manning Regional Art Gallery until Saturday 10 May 2025.
Artists include Alison Bennett (VIC), Neil Binnie (QLD), K.Verell (Blue Screen of Death) (TAS), Gail Mabo (QLD), Ron McBurnie (QLD), Jenny Mulcahy (QLD), Catherine Parker (QLD), David Rowe (QLD), Jason Sims (SA), Stephen Spurrier (QLD), Rhonda Stevens (QLD).
POSTWORLD features Australian artists who create parallel universes. Audiences are invited into the playful, sublime, poetic and cautionary in this exhibition. Drawing on the detritus of human experience, these worlds have their own internal languages existing in alternate time and space.
Co-curators Kate O'Hara and Daniel Qualischefski said in a joint statement, 'The exhibition came into consciousness when artist Ron McBurnie brought a small handmade red box into Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts. Inside was a world created by three friends by postal collaboration over more than ten years. Through over 70 works on paper, the artists have been creating a language of hieroglyphics to express an astral travel saga resonant with humour, dread, panic and joy. The world is cumulative and inflected with the changing socio environmental context of the world around them over the last decade. They have been constantly shifting and adapting each other's work to find or even make meaning.'
'Prior to this', they continued, 'POSTWORLD, as a curatorial premise, existed in the subconscious as noise, confusion, and fear, alongside sparks of hope, images of the past, present and future - at times bleak, at times beautiful.'
As the show was built, each artist's work expanded on this thematic provocation, finding pathways to comfort, resistant to the overwhelming sense of panic. Stillness, awe and appreciation resonated, honouring the world beyond its utility to provide resources for consumption in the Anthropocene.
New fictions (and possible futures) are rendered, providing alternate perspectives on the environment, gender and capitalist hegemony.
POSTWORLD is on display at Manning Regional Art Gallery until 10 May 2025.
POSTWORLD officially opens at Manning Regional Art Gallery on 14 March 2025 at 6pm, all welcome and entry is free.
