Griffith University Art Museum (GUAM) presents Just between us, an exhibition featuring works from the Griffith University Art Collection and exploring how artists reveal intimate details of their lives while testing the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private.
Curated by Lizzie Riek, the exhibition brings together practices of narration, self-portraiture and diaristic recording, alongside visual languages that create a sense of immediacy and nostalgia. It considers how autobiographical reference has evolved from an essential feminist strategy to a contemporary fixation on identity and self-disclosure.
Featuring works by Ian Abdulla, Davida Allen, Gloria Beckett, Gordon Bennett, Kate Beynon, Ray Cook, Justine Cooper, Maree Cunnington, Julie Fragar, Chantal Fraser, Helen Fuller, Tyza Hart, Diana Leach, Ruth Maddison, Tracey Moffatt, Archie Moore, Liam O’Brien, Jill Orr, Gloria Tamerre Petyarre, Scott Redford, Monica Rohan, David M. Thomas and Jenny Watson.
Through hypothetical realities, desires, memories and fears, each artist offers something of themselves and invites viewers to do the same. The exhibition explores the ambiguities between the autobiographical and fictitious, the intensely personal and universal, and the remembered and experienced self.
Further public programs will be announced throughout the exhibition.
Image: Davida Allen, Faces and Heart from the series ‘Sam Neill Suite’, 1986, collage, synthetic polymer paint and ink on paper, 53.8 x 75.4cm. Griffith University Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by the artist, 2007. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Carl Warner
