The Institute of Modern Art’s annual survey of recent Queensland visual art graduates is always a difficult exhibition, and Fresh Cut 2006 proved no different. Whether intentional on the part of the curators or not, all of the works selected for this ‘best of’ show are, or aim to be, intensely personal. Domestic spaces and objects—bedrooms, kitchens, books, cooking utensils, food, washing machines and crockery—overwhelmed the exhibition.
Gail Cowley’s installation of chipped enamel ware bowls scattered and piled in a corner was a disturbing commentary on the effect of forced institutionalisation (be it in a prison or psychiatric ward) on individuals. Inside each bowl is a naive portrait of an inmate, and while these anonymous faces were discarded in a jumbled, forgotten heap, Cowley had been careful to ensure that in their hair colour or clothing, flourishes of individuality persist.
Much less grim was Kirra Jamison’s wall-mounted installation of ’50’s pastel plates on a painted map of creeping veins. The effect was that the plates looked like blooms or nodes on a tree branch or nerve system, or more specifically, like the space where the annotated illustrations on a family tree might go, drawing attention to their possible interconnected histories and origins. I wonder, however, what complex interconnected histories could really be found in a selection of mass-produced kitchenware items from the same, reasonably recent era. Perhaps this is a deliberate allusion to the limits of white Australian history, or a suggestion that growth does not imply change, but ultimately Jamison’s salmony pink veins, buttery yellow plates and powder blue saucers felt to me like a kitsch exercise in colour coordination. Sharing the same room were Florence Tetuira’s three etchings