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Big Square Eye

Brisbane Festival

Tamara Alderman, Michelle Cimino, Georgia Grainger, Ahmad Halimi, Bronwyn Julius, Kelly Luo, Zoe McNeany, Carl Menke, Ryan Presley, Eliot Rae, Tyson Saylor, Daniel Shelton, Chloe Trim, Tahlee Walsh, Stephany Ward. Producer: Vivian Hogg
Louise Rollman
Eyeline 67
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‘Big Square Eye’ deals with big, ambitious themes by young and emerging artists between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. The average age of participants suggests that issues prevalent in their recent compulsory reading may persist at the forefront of their thoughts. Specifically, the all-seeing surveillance of Big Brother in 1984 and the empathetic words of Atticus Finch detailed in To Kill a Mockingbird. Many of the artists are grappling with their own identities and immediate comprehension of the world; rather than walking in anyone else’s ill-fitting ideologies, they tie their laces together.

In Big Square Eye’s diverse collection of works there exists a preoccupation with the eye’s privileged position in an ordering of the senses. This is exemplified in the work of Carl Menke, Daniel Shelton, Tamara Alderman and the visually resplendent kaleidoscopes of Bronwyn Julius, who proclaims her love of crazy colours and patterns. The project focuses on the nature of perception, inward/outward-focused chaos, and the articulation of ostensible realities.

Perception is explored in private and public psychological spaces: in the inner surveillance of Stephany Ward; the optical mirrors of Georgia Grainger’s portraits; the bouncing Chinese zodiac animals of Kelly Luo; Eliot Rae’s clay animation, in part a fractious response to his lack of videos at the time; and in Michelle Cimino’s work, which specifically focuses on switching perspectives with the pet dog. Or where Ahmad Halimi and Zoe McNeany further blur the distinctions between body and screen environments. Furthermore, the fifteen ‘chapters’ or works, separated by each artist’s slowly blinking eye, were screened within multiple exhibition designs or contexts. At The Block, this included small galleries with collaboratively developed bright pixelated-graphic wallpaper or amidst a tower