To look and to wonder

Brisbane and Elsewhere Art UnTriennial, in partnership with Wreckers Artspace, present ‘To look and to wonder’, featuring new work by Kylie Spear, and Talia Smith.

The word mirage comes to English via the French mirage, from the Latin mirari, meaning “to look at, to wonder at”. In contrast to a hallucination, a mirage is a real optical phenomenon that can be captured on camera, since light rays are actually refracted to form the false image at the observer’s location.

Working at the cross-section between memory, truth and fiction, artists Kylie Spear and Talia Smith reimagine time and place, and utilise visual, auditory and experiential aids to construct new shared realities.

Spear’s own auditory hallucinatory experiences as a child form a complex construction of memory, with clarity fading as time passes and the recollection altered by the hallucinations. Using interactive soft sculpture, scent and sound, viewers are enticed into a semi meditative state, where the act of recollection becomes shared between the artist, the space and the audience.

Smith’s interest in the landscape, and in particular the traces of time left on a place, inform her use of photography, video and installation which offers a personal reclamation of the land. In reimagining the place, she constructs a new realm through which to experience the landscape, informed by evidence of temporal change in the place and from the artist. Her visual medium creates a homogenous surface that the viewer can slip in and out of, and on which the real and the fictitious become intertwined.

Together, these artists respond to the place of Brisbane, and elsewhere, through a lens of personal experience and perception to be developed as an shared experience with the viewer.

Opening night
Wednesday 10 April 2019
6-9pm

Additional Gallery times tbc