New art by new Queensland artists
2012 marked the fourth annual installment of ‘Test Pattern – New Art by New Queensland Artists’ at Ryan Renshaw Gallery. The exhibition showcased the work of six emerging artists chosen by gallery owners Ryan Renshaw and Danielle Harrigan from the 2011 graduate shows at the Queensland University of Technology and Queensland College of Art. This year the line up included Dana Lawrie, Caitlin Franzmann, Yavuz Erkan, Hannah Piper, Jared Worthington and Dord Burrough. For the majority of these artists, Test Pattern provided a rare initiation into the commercial art industry in a city which, despite the existence of a plethora of artist run initiatives, still finds itself wanting in the area of commercial industry support. For the commitment Test Pattern has made to filling part of this vacuum, Ryan Renshaw Gallery has been commended by industry and commercial media alike.
For collectors, the exhibition provided some new faces to register and, for the particularly confident, some early investment opportunities. For the art-going public who forgot their wallets, it provided a small but succinct survey of recent art-making trends from the latest batch of art school graduates. As a member of the latter rather than the former demographic, my interest was in the gallery’s choices from these 2011 classes, and what conclusions regarding emerging art-making trends could be drawn from them.
Although the exhibition contained a few choice picks from the diminishing group of graduate painters, inter-media work dominated the selection which certainly reflected the heavy influence of international contemporary trends (made even more fashionable by the 2011 Venice Biennale) of working in immersive and interactive installation. This international influence, which has become the norm within art school research and practice