This is a talk about the relational qualities of colours. Colours as palettes—those marauding squads of socially and culturally recognised hues—which get what they need by working together.
We live in a more highly chromatic world then ever before in human history. Colour is a major component of capitalism. Perhaps erroneously we think of colour as an individual choice. Chroma links together industrial wares, household goods, cars, clothing, landscapes, physical buildings, and digital worlds. Diana Young will discuss some palettes of colour in landscapes, art works and exhibitions to understand what it is colours can do together.
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Dr Diana Young is a scholar, writer, educator and curator. Her work is about visual and material culture. This includes art and other kinds of stuff. She lectures in anthropology at the University of Queensland where she is also the director of the Anthropology Museum—the largest university collection of its kind in Australia. Re-inventing so-called ‘ethnographic’ museums for the 21st century is a major interest.
She has established a new research infrastructure for the museum since 2012, including an online catalogue and a rolling exhibition program which enables the collection to be seen by the public as well as university staff and students. She has developed a program of acquisition for the collection of work by women artists and makers.
Dr Young has been researching colours on and off since the mid 1990s and has a forthcoming book on this topic, Rematerializing Colour; From Concept to Substance (Sean Kingston Publishing, UK).
The thirteen exhibitions that she has curated or co-curated include, In the red; on the vibrancy of things in 2012.
