ALONE TOGETHER is an exhibition that showcases works by four recent Queensland graduates – Karike Ashworth, Alrey Batol, Tayla Haggerty and Sancinyta Simpson. These artists are negotiating the complexities of voicing individual experiences and concerns, by drawing on the language and objects of the everyday. The exhibition also explores the importance of connectivity for artists in a climate of uncertainty.
Karike Ashworth’s practice brings together time-based media, text, objects and installations and explores social practice, collaboration and the private-made-public. These broad areas of interest frame her more specific concerns with the way mutual implication, ambiguity and social or emotional discomfort in contemporary art can disrupt normative enculturation and potentially aggravate the social conscious. Karike graduated with Honours in Visual Arts at QUT in 2014, and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at QCA in 2013. Her solo exhibition Lamentation was shown at The Hold Artspace, Brisbane, in July 2014, and with the support of Arts Queensland, will be touring regional Queensland and NSW throughout 2015-2017. She was awarded the Godfrey River Medal (QCA) and was a finalist in the Graduate Art Show (GAS) at Griffith University Art Gallery in 2013, and in Excerpts: Visual Arts Showcase at The Block, QUT in 2014.
Alrey Batol works across sculpture, installation, web and graphic design, game design, sound art, electronics, computing and photography to explore a personalised ontology of material and capitalist culture. His approach is informed by immigrating to Australia from the Philippines and examining how materialism affects communities and people’s lives. By highlighting the obsolescence and dependance of goods and services ranging from clock radios and Skype connections to iPad games and superfictive shop windows, Alrey’s work exposes the absurdity of our complicity with affluence and capitalist culture. Alrey completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from Queensland College of Art. He has exhibited nationally including at Metro Arts, Witchmeat ARI, The Walls and Inhouse ARI in Queensland, Seventh Gallery (Melbourne) and ArtBar event, MCA (Sydney).
Tayla Haggarty’s work engages with installation, sculpture, found objects, photography and performance. Her practice, both individually and as a part of collaboration ‘Parallel Park’, explores how queer and feminist identity can be constructed through materials, to formally articulate and archive lesbian experience. The works negotiate elements of tension, balance and an investigation of ‘sameness’, in the context of difference within queer culture. Tayla’s sculptures utilise everyday objects such as wheelbarrows, ropes and buckets to create moments of fragility and tension and reflect on personal narratives of queer experience. Tayla graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from QUT in 2014, and is currently completing her Honours degree at the same institution. Her works have been exhibited in Brisbane galleries including The Hold Artspace and at The Block, QUT as well as the Ildiko Butler Gallery in New York.
Sancintya Simpson’s photo-media and video-based critical practice combines traditional mediums with digital platforms. Under her rap-persona of CHICHI MA$ALA, Simpson’s hip-hop music videos develop sistahood as a method of critique and disruption to the racial fetishism experienced by young mixed-race women in Australia. Reclaiming and disrupting stereotypes of the exotic other and tragic mulatta, the absurd combines with the sexual and hostile to collectively create a space for self-representation. Sancintya graduated with Bachelor of Photography, Honours from QCA in 2014. She has exhibited in Brisbane including Subtropic Complex James Street Precinct/IMA, Graduate Art Show (The GAS), Griffith University Art Gallery, the National Artists’ Self-Portraiture Prize, UQ Art Museum, and has also held solo exhibitions at the Queensland Centre for Photography and Ipswich Art Gallery.
Image: CHICHI MA$ALA (Sancintya Simpson) Mixed Girl Militia ft. Big Sezzo, BO$$ANOVA & MAÏA (prod. Boy Venus), 2014.