Artists in residence
The Museum of Brisbane (MoB) is proving to be a remarkably successful innovation for the creative culture of Queensland's capital. This one venue, which comfortably exhibits contemporary art practice beside social and community history, has redrawn the lines of curatorial practice. 'Avalon: Artists in Residence' is the most vivid example of this form of hybridised exhibition and, although modest, is remarkably successful.
Exhibition producer, Ricardo Felipe has been researching the history of his own block of flats, the 1930s apartment building 'Avalon' in Brunswick St, New Farm, and the building's recent culture of resident artists. This exhibition is partly a homage to that building and partly a survey of the remarkably diverse practices of a number of artists who have lived in Avalon since the early 1990s.
Avalon is unusual in that, rather than using the conventional numbering system for its twenty-six apartments, the flats are lettered from A to Z. This has allowed the exhibition's curatorium of Ricardo Felipe, Skye Raabe and Luke Roberts to structure the exhibition around the lettering system, each participating artist nominating an evocative word starting with their flat's letter. These words running high on the wall of the gallery create a framework for the display of both artworks (forty-eight A4 pigment prints on matte paper) and personal artefacts from the building's resident artists. We observe that certain flats have a particularly rich artistic history, having housed a number of artists.
And the survey of artistic practice presented in reproduction in the MoB show is really a microcosm of the local art scene. The cross-section is diverse and remarkably eclectic, from the Icon paintings of Leonard Brown (who operated an Eastern Orthodox chapel in his