Matthew Dabrowski, Maryanne Venables, Natalie Lynch, Margo McClintock, Alex Prior
From the interior of Gallerie Brutal you can look out to the lights of Brisbane, a place not known for its tolerance of the marginal or experimental. However there remains a core of arts practice exhibited at galleries like Brutal that thrives despite it all.
Sad as it is, that our art training institutions have become sheltered workshops for over achievers, there are some interesting consequences of having a Claytons art education. One of them, is that two decades of de-skilling in basic technique have helped to push other forms of art practice to the fore.
A bonus for the young artists experimenting with visual language is that while most people can pick a bad painting, how many people know what to make of a conceptually based object. But we all know good or bad isn't really the issue ... don't we? A recent example of the challenge still posed by the conceptual in art was the exhibition titled, Posed As a Freedom To Choose. The works chosen by curator, Joseph O'Connor, were individually strong and collectively provocative. They included Margo McCiintock's, biscuit tin labelled "take me, I'm yours"; Matthew Dabrowski's four white squares on the floor and a box on the wall inscribed with words like suck, slide, juice, play, orgasm; Maryanne Venables's box that when open reveals a collage of information about figs and a glass fronted box with three apples labelled Rene's House, Rene's Mind and Rene; Natalie Lynch's film of one girl skipping, another staring a chest of draws, and book shelves holding various books with a music score on the wall behind it; and Alex Prior 's braille script which was performed as part of