Trudi Prideaux, Anne Lord, Barbara Pierce, Kim Mahood
On a number of levels, dis/Piace could be said to involve notions of extension. It included the work of four women artists who are members of Townsville's Umbrella Studio, it challenged traditional representations of the land and the environment, and it questioned the perceived position of the artist/s within the art-political landscape of Queensland.
With reference to the regional exchange program, whereby the Institute of Modern Art's(IMA's) exhibitions, dis/Piace, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas and Who's Sorry Now, by Michele Helmrich, have been shown also at Umbrella Studio, Tsoutas outlined the IMA's intent: a repositioning of the Centre from without; a re-radicalising of discourses from the margins; the displacement of mythologies and the denial of dependence and prejudice.
Trudi Prideaux's installation in dis/Piace was concerned with the socio-historical uses of high art imagery. The visitor was provided with a 'backdrop' to the gallery space, which re-positioned the relationships between viewer, the gallery and the artwork. The work was hung away from the walllong strips of calico which moved slightly with air currents, and on which were painted columns and emblems from an idyllic age but which were in fact copied from local funerary monuments. Prideaux's work was suffused with the ironies of illusory realities and of desire.
The impact of process on meaning was central to the installation. The works were on calico rather than canvas, they were unframed, and the artist allowed references to what has been seen as folkart (the quilt, the amateur theatre production), to intersect with transplanted and ironically rearranged high-art icons of British Imperialist culture. The dysfunctional mechanisms through which orthodoxy is disseminated allow the recipient to see through the process.
The traditional scientific use of