The Hold Artspace warmly invites you to the opening of three concurrent exhibitions opening on Saturday the 21st of March from 6-8pm.
Greer Townshend | ‘With You’
Underpinned by ideas of fragility and the self, ‘With You’ brings together recent works by Greer Townshend. Using expressive mark making, absence and recurring motifs, Townshend’s charcoal works explore notions of the soul, personal history and their means of expression.
“I think the soul is a shape-shifter, a gatherer of memories, a deliverer of dreams. A quiet truth. It is our mystery spelt out in four letters. I believe it is what drives the curious pull we sometimes have towards each other.
I find flowers exceptionally beautiful – unsurprising given their intent to seduce. To me, they are the ideal motif to allude to the soul, to one’s history, to evoke a feeling. Their delicate, ephemeral nature aligns with ours and their history is equally as enticing.
The basic, natural element of working with charcoal aids my wish for my paper to be a space where I prune and prune everything back, for each drawing to be a kind of Haiku. In this vein, the work is also influenced by the Japanese concept of ‘ma,’ meaning emptiness or the essential interval between things.”
Peter Kozak | ‘Ghosts’
‘Ghosts’ is a response to the murders of Sophie Collombet, Eunji Ban, Min Tae Kim and Meenatchi Narayanan – all foreign exchange students who were murdered in Brisbane between November 2013 and March 2014, and the continued efforts of Brisbane Universities to promote themselves to foreign students despite the killings.
Taking place beneath a fire-damaged bridge in Toronto, Kozak’s video performance uses gestures from striptease and bullfighting to subvert the function of a shirt that was designed to be used as a promotional tool. Divorced from their original context, these movements become haunting and sinister – combining seduction with the threat or suggestion of harm.
James Mullholland | ‘Alter Ego’
James Mullholland’s practice investigates the ‘nocturnal self’ that exists inside the young Brisbane male. Examining its formative relationship with crime scenes and ‘hooliganism’ that are culturally inseparable from the nightlife in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, Mullholland produces large, graphic, drawn, re-interpretations of this imagery on paper. The authenticity of the young male ‘deviant’ that frequents in news worthy ‘crime narratives’ is placed under scrutiny and separated from contemporary media driven myths. Ultimately, Alter Ego provides an outlet in which Mullholland explores his own ‘nocturnal self’ as well as those of his subjects.
Opening Night: Saturday 21st of March, 6-8pm
Artist Talks: Saturday 28th March, 6-8pm
Image: Greer Townshend, ‘Things We Both Know (Portrait of Katherine Mansfield)’, charcoal on paper.
