For the 2023 Brisbane Art and Design (BAD) Festival, FireWorks Gallery is staging Halfway House. This mixed media exhibition poses questions about what a halfway house might mean through the work of 16 Brisbane-based artists. As an intersectional place that has become home for so many travellers, Brisbane’s rich cultural and social history is reflected in work that traverses generations, identities, and changing ideas of belonging.
Co-curated by Pat Hoffie and Lily Eather, Halfway House invited artists from a range of backgrounds, demographics, cultures and experiences to consider key issues. Established artists Carol McGregor, Kevin Leong & Elizabeth Woods, Sally Molloy, Shannon Brett, Suzie Hawkins, Vanghoua Anthony Vue and Sara Iran Nejad work alongside emerging artists Christy McKinless Nalingu, Mia Boe, Visaya Hoffie and Josh Herd together with FireWorks stalwarts David Paulson, Jennifer Herd, Joanne Currie Nalingu and Laurie Nilsen.
FireWorks Gallery’s long history as an independent, commercial gallery promoting experimentation and collaboration is continued in this exciting project. Co-curator Pat Hoffie comments, “Lily and I invited artists to respond to some of the invisible boundary-lines that criss-cross our contemporary world – definitions and barriers that restrict identities and states-of-being”. The mediums used are as diverse as the responses; artists are working with installation, sculpture, painting, photography and video to explore our shifting understanding of time, space, authority, memory, identity and family relationships.
To coincide with the exhibition opening celebrations on Saturday 20th May from 3pm-5pm, FireWorks Gallery will also host an Artists’ (carpark) Party themed: In Between, Out the Back and Up the Creek from 5pm– 8pm. There’ll be a cash bar for food and drinks amidst lights, lounges, DJ tunes – and the opportunity to revel in the messy contradictions that form the Brisbane Art and Design scene.
Image: Sally Molloy, Costumes and Circusry, 2020, acrylic, gouache, pencil, and vinyl emulsion on canvas, 101.5 x 152.5cm
