Panel Discussion: Polly Borland: Everything I want to be when I grow up

WHEN : 6th Sep, 2:00 – 3:00pm

WHERE : UQ Art Museum

A panel discussion responding to the exhibition Polly Borland: Everything I want to be when I grow up, with curator Alison Kubler, Frances Bonner and Jay Younger.

Polly Borland’s photographic practice has straddled commercial/photographic documentary, and fine art practice, and is characterised by an edgy sensibility that lends her images tension and resonance. Her concerns have included identity, the outcast, beauty and ugliness. Drawn to the weird and wonderful, Borland’s left-of-centre approach transforms the ordinary, even banal, into the extraordinary.

Everything I want to be when I grow up is the first exhibition to survey the different strands of Borland’s work. It includes portraits of famous faces such as Cate Blanchett, Nick Cave and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and the series Australians, The Babies, Bunny and Smudge, and the most recent series, Pupa. Borland has lived in Britain since 1989, and presently lives in Los Angeles, USA.

Panellists:

France Bonner is a Reader in Television and Popular Culture in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on cultural studies approaches to the representation of celebrity, and is co-author of Fame Games: the Production of Celebrity in Australia, (Cambridge University Press: 2000), with Graeme Turner and David Marshall.

Jay Younger is a practising artist and curator, and Associate Professor and Convenor of Photography at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Jay’s research interests focus on the body, gender and space, and find form in photomedia, public art and site-specific installations.