Exhibition

26.05.06 - 24.06.06
Main Gallery
Terra Incognita
Nicole Andrijevic, Simon Evans, Bridget O'Brien, Jessica Rankin, Christian Thompson, Simon Yates. Curated by Jacqueline Doughty.
supported by the British Council

It is not down on any map, true places never are.

- Moby Dick

Terra Incognita brings together six Australian and international artists who draw on the language of cartography to chart an internal landscape of ideas, memories and emotions. Their maps give visual form to the intangible conceptual forces that shape our lives just as concretely as our physical surroundings. While these intuitive maps may not be factual, they are true, and they offer the viewer a passage through interior worlds more profound than those in the pages of an atlas.

Nicole Andrijevic makes floor-based topographical landscapes, formed from layered mounds of multi-coloured sand. Owing more to the world of imagination than to geography, these miniature mountains and islands in acid shades of yellow, pink and blue stretch across the floor like an archipelago in some psychedelic republic.

Simon Evans makes drawings of lists, charts and maps that make order out of the daily challenges of life - relationships, career, anxieties, health - often in a humorously arbitrary way. Pieced together with notebook paper, biro, tape and correction fluid, the work has a homemade, diaristic quality, and these humble materials become Evans' tools to map the human condition.

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces gratefully acknowledges the British Council's support in bringing Simon Evans' work to Melbourne.

Bridget O’Brien’s wall-paintings stem from an interest in the links between mapping and landscape painting and alternatives to Western cartographic traditions. The abstract forms in her work are reminiscent of land-masses, but also suggest motion and the idiosyncratic ways we perceive and move through the space that surrounds us.

Jessica Rankin embroiders text and images onto sheer organdy to make “brain-maps”, ethereal wall-hangings that offer a glimpse into the workings of the mind. Fragments of conversations, dreams, memories and day-to-day observations mingle in a delicate network of stitched phrases and images that map our elusive thought processes.

Christian Thompson questions dominant representations of Australian indigenous culture, using video, performance and photography to chart what he terms a 'complex series of identities.' Through his work he structures his identity as an indigenous Australian and a conceptual artist, setting the coordinates for his own cultural map.

Simon Yates’ ongoing project “Universal Cloaking Device” is nothing less than an attempt to map the world of art and ideas. His ingenious constructions and drawings combine high concepts, pop culture, visual puns and word play to build a kinetic, map-like metaphor for the inventive and associative mind of the artist.