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Prime is an annual Queensland Art Gallery event for National Youth Week, and this year it was a small scale exhibition that presented quality work by eight artists under the age of thirty-five.
Prime succeeded in its aim to feature a variety of media, through the representation of sculpture, installation, photography, video and painting, by Peter Alwast, Chris Handran, Natalya Hughes, Alasdair Macintyre, Sandra Selig, Grant Stevens, Daniel Templeman and Jemima Wyman. However, with all eight artists based in Brisbane (although Hughes is studying in Sydney) Prime failed in its claim to explore new art from Queensland. The exhibition could have been a perfect vehicle to present an array of work from across the State as well as the capital, to present audiences with new artists not shown in Brisbane and with work that is not so easily accessed.
Despite the geographically limited selection, Prime’s inclusion of a diverse mix of media underscored the fact that no one medium currently dominates art practice. Three approaches to painting were presented by Wyman, Hughes and Alwast. Wyman’s Scapeology works appear stylistically different from her previous paintings of grids formed from paint runs; however these new works are linked to the earlier in their exploration of the performative nature of paint, in this instance through enamel’s viscosity. The Scapeology works depict topographies suggestive of the instability of the earth’s surface, and were influenced by the artist’s recent residency in Los Angeles, notorious for its risk of earthquakes. Wyman’s application of the full spectrum of colours is controlled across a multitude of closely demarcated areas. A tension exists between the precise colour application and the ripples created from the heavily poured enamel which suggest