Andrew Simpson
What is it like to remove yourself from everything that is familiar and go and live and work on the other side of the world? That is exactly what two Australian artist couples did by moving to the United Arab Emirates and working as artists and art educators. The result of this extraordinary collaborative adventure was seen in the exhibition “Transit” that was recently on show at Macquarie University’s Art Gallery. This work by Meredith Brice, Stephen Copland, Karee S. Dahl and Colin G. Reaney has also travelled the world showing in Qatar and Singapore before being seen in Australia.
I knew about this work and had met some of the artists before “Transit” came to Australia. I was delighted to be asked to open the Macquarie version of the show. After the opening night a few people asked for a copy of my speech notes. So here’s a “version” of what I said after the “welcome to country” by senior Darug man, Lexodius Dadd.
My only experience of the Middle East started at 6am one morning, many years ago, lining up approaching customs at Tehran Airport. I was a stranger and everyone in the line knew it. Remarkably, the response of a few people in the line was, “Welcome, you are a guest in our country, you must go to the head of the line”.
You never see that happening at Mascot. It was a powerful message about how we view people who are different from ourselves, how we view “the other”. This exhibition is all about similar questions.
Transit: it is a state of flux, motion, uncertainty, of being between places, between times, between major events – a passage from one to the other. It is in fact the very basis of existence – we are constantly in transit.
This is an important exhibition that asks some very big questions. It asks questions about the relationship between place, experience and identity. It is also a structurally remarkable exhibition, as it is based on an artistic and curatorial collaboration between two pairs of talented artistic practitioners. It is the result of their time working together immersed in a different culture, time spent in the United Arab Emirates.
Stephen Copland, Merry Brice, Karee Dahl and Colin Reaney have together produced a stunning piece of cross-cultural discourse, resonant with themes of migration, trans-global identity and the transitory and shifting boundaries by which we attempt to understand ourselves and others. Exploring the curatorial themes of this cutting edge exhibition is both a challenge and a delight.
Stephen Copland’s work capturing fragments of identity, classifying experience, is a taxonomy of identity, in other words people in transit – in this space it is beautifully juxtaposed by:-
2. Merry Brice’s work “Nature in transit” soft sculptural forms, a classification of ephemeral shapes, a taxonomy of nature.
Having both these works at either end of the gallery is a very clever piece of art curatorship.
A culture-nature axis runs through all the ideas presented in this exhibition.
3. Karee Dahl’s woven pieces that make up “Dependant” in three parts namely – departure, travel and landfall – all about how the increasing complexity of experience, increases understanding.
4. Colin Reaney has explored the concept of home – the inside and outside of place as a psychological diagram.
And everywhere throughout the exhibition there are– shoes – a metaphor for something that connects us to a point in time and space but also enables us to transit through places and times.
The questions that underlie this exhibition are truly the biggest and most urgent questions we need to ask. There are billions of people on the planet with an incredible diversity of culture, language, world views and heritage. We don’t just need to preserve this diversity; we must ask questions of it, we must live it and celebrate it. Without doing this we will be condemned to a bleak and miserable future.
This is especially important today where modern communications and the democratisation of information rank one person’s ignorant prejudices as of equal value to another’s engagement and understanding. How easy is the complacency of not thinking and simply accepting the two dimensional stereotypical views dished up in the tsunami of the daily news cycle, dismissing the unfamiliar, the challenging and the different as not worthy of our attention let alone our understanding.
Globalisation has increased our connectivity, and with that comes the responsibility to engage, to ask questions, to learn and to fundamentally change ourselves, driving us forward into complex new cross-cultural ecologies. Anyone here remember the Asian Century white paper? Same questions, same imperatives, just without the economic clothing.
Our artists have, operating as a learning collaborative, asked those questions, taken those risks and through their practice now share the results with us. It transformed them in the process, and it will transform their audiences. It will take you to some interesting new places, here’s one of them from the catalogue:-
Transit
Time’s arrow propels us through a continuum from one state to another.
Each instant rich with an infinity of possibilities
new landscapes, new meanings, new contexts and new understanding.
The sun punishes the white stone walls
Fingers of light reach deep into the geometry of human structures before retreating
People congregate under cool archways in response, a dance played out
continually and repetitively on a fleeting and impermanent canvas, time’s cycle.
The universe expands, the universe collapses
Every breath deep and new
The shock of the unknown the temporary and the transient
Hold a spectrum of meanings for those who understand where they come from
but don’t always know where they are going
Snowflakes fall, each one a tiny ice sculpture, unlike any other,
billions of them, like us, born of serendipity, buffeted by circumstance.
Melted tomorrow, piled high in grey threatening clouds the next day,
Crashing through a deep channel in a rain forest the day after.
Transit is a state of mind, it can be an open clearing, a refuge
Between tumultuous worlds or events. It can be the uncertainty
Between day and night, the counterbalance between thought and action.
It can be both a moment of clarity and a moment of confusion,
the moment between life and death.
Engagement, enrichment and epiphany, the fabric of existence.
Time’s arrow, time’s cycle
The Exhibition itself also has a trans-global history travelling from Qatar to Singapore and now to Sydney, and at each place has, I believe very appropriately, been exhibited in a university gallery space. Like our artists learning collective, universities are also learning collectives. And all universities, including Macquarie, are in a state of transit. But, in a rapidly changing world, those universities that become hidebound in traditional silos of academic disciplines, fail to ask questions, fail to take risks, ignore the potential of inter-disciplinary spaces, base all their decisions on the sterile and shifting sands of metrics – those universities will find their creativity congeal and they will lose the ability to transform themselves.
In the neoliberal world of higher education these days, too many universities cover the walls of their gallery spaces with corporate wallpaper in an attempt to affect a delusional grand narrative about the power and significance of the institution.
Self referential rubbish, I say!
And a criminal misuse of space!
University art galleries need to be experimental learning laboratories, a place of discourse where new ideas, new challenges, new questions are asked and answered head on.
As places of discourse and inter-cultural exchange and engagement, these spaces are the future incubators of meaningful understanding and active citizenship. They are a transcendent portal to other worlds. We are certainly blessed that here at Macquarie our gallery is used in this way, and this exhibition is a magnificent example of that spirit.