EXHIBITION DATES:Saturday, 4 April 2009 - Sunday, 17 May 2009
OPENING:Opening 6-8pm Friday 3 April
Jane Burton, Luke Pither, Paul Gazzola, Rewi Lyall, Richard Giblett, Sally Ross, Simon Pericich, Starlie Geikie, and selected Victorian botanic artists.
Guest Curator: Andrew Gaynor
The title for this exhibition A Secret Life of Plants is inspired, in part, by the circumstances behind Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (Vol 1). Released in 1979, the album was recorded as the soundtrack to a planned, but unreleased 1978 documentary of the same name. As a result, the critical and fan response at the time of Journey's release was confused, due to the audience being required to imagine the visuals of the unseen film in an attempt to 'unlock' Wonder's experimental thematic music.
In a similar vein, the artists in this exhibition are equally veiled in their own depictions. Rather, their plants appear in many guises - as the nicotined survivors of exhausted suburbia; as elusive lifeforms at the tops of buildings, behind walls, or bursting - fecund and faintly obscene - from the masonry itself; or even as out-and-out weeds, those planty refugees which assimilate so well among us.
Andrew Gaynor is an independent curator, writer and researcher currently based in Melbourne. He has worked at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), the Art Gallery of Western Australia, jacksue (an artist-run gallery, also in Perth), Gould Galleries, Melbourne, and the McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park in Langwarrin, Victoria.
Andrew's recent curatorial projects include the first Survey of the painter Louise Hearman for Glen Eira City Gallery, Melbourne; a focussed show of nine Australian Modernists for the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth; and the Artrage 25-year anniversary exhibition SILVER at PICA.
