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Once upon a time, before the word ‘awesome’ began to be used to describe just about everything, it was reserved for things that were grand, or particularly admirable, or possibly even those inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence. It’s this kind of description that matches the awesomeness of Sciencefictive, Gary Carsley’s ‘interior garden’ at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art.

 Influenced by a project in Singapore, which matched the planets of the solar system with the gardens of that small island nation, Carsley has installed his fantasy ‘Mappa Mundi’ (or map of the world, medieval style) in two large gallery spaces. Placing his hometown of Brisbane at the imaginary ‘centre of the world’, viewers are led through this fantasy display via a winding path painted on the floor.

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Where are you right now? Indoors or outdoors? What if it could be both - or like,neither, man. That's the question the Gary Carsley's new exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art asks, bringing the constructed ideas of garden and galley together. Two galley spaces will be punctured by 'Moondoors' (much less murderous than the Game Of Thrones kind) turning the traditional white walled art space into a window into gardens from around the world. Running from May 31 to July 26, the exhibition also features re-surfaced Ikea furniture and other pieces to disrupt our ideas of inside and out.

Brisbane-born, Sydney-based artist Gary Carsley has become internationally recognised for his large digital photographs, where he swaps out tonal areas in the image (usually a landscape) for similarly toned woodgrain patterns. He calls these posterised images "draguerrotypes" (referring to an early form of photography) because they are like photography in drag: photography dressed as impressionist painting.

The drageurrotypes collapse and conflate the analogue into the digital, the old-fashioned into the new-fangled, painting into photography, and conceptualism into craft. 

Carsley's show will take the form of a large landscape garden that articulates values common to the garden traditions of both East and West. It will contain follies, water features and paths, and several moongates (or stargates) that magically link remote parts of the world to each other.

Coincidences and relationships connect like a web in Gary Carsley’s new exhibition 'Sciencefictive’ (2014) at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Here, East meets West, exterior meets interior, art meets science, global meets local, and natural meets constructed.

Carsley’s immersive work spreads out across two galleries, the walls punctuated by ‘Moongates’. Rendered in a combination of textures and colours, including wood panelling, linoleum and marble, these ‘moongate’ apertures open onto natural vistas for an effect that is simultaneously familiar and alien.

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Gary Carsley’s new installation at IMA places Brisbane at the centre of landscape traditions.

Sciencefictive is a new installation by artist Gary Carsley, opening at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) this weekend, Saturday 31 May.

Brisbane-born Carsley has become known for his modular furniture installations that create spatial gardens, illusions inserted into the gallery, museum and art fair to contest and question our perception and relationship to the natural environment.

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An interview with cover artist Bill Thompson in the June issue of Sculpture Magazine, by Christopher Hart Chambers. 

Blacktown Arts Centre will host a discussion about the legacy of Gough Whitlam, who chose the suburb to launch the ''It's Time'' federal election campaign in 1972.

A panel of writers and artists will share their thoughts on the former Labor prime minister, who introduced free university education, Medibank (Medicare's predecessor), FM radio and the Australia Council for the Arts, at the free Sydney Writers' Festival event on May 23.

They include authors Jane Caro and Fiona McGregor, film producer Gary Paramanthan and artist Gary Carsley, who curated the current related It's Timely exhibition.

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...Eye-catching paintings included Clayton Colvin’s probing multilayered works shown by Beta Pictoris (Birmingham, AL), Diana Copperwhite’s colorful but lugubrious canvases at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, the acid-distressed oils of Sara Hoppe from Dresden’s M2A gallery, Ethiopian painter Tegene Kunbi’s strangely doleful striations of color at Margaret Thatcher Gallery’s booth, Chris Trueman’s hypnotically undulating grids from Adah Rose Gallery (Kensington, MD), and a brace of small paintings by Jill Baroff, Astrid Bowlby, and Allyson Strafella at Philadelphia’s Gallery Joe.

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...PULSE and NADA feature smaller, younger galleries who in turn discover new talent.  I encountered several artists for the first time whose work I look forward to following for years to come, but the "whoa! stop-me-in-my-tracks" moment was seeing from a distance the luminous color-field paintings by Tegene Kunbi in the Margaret Thatcher Projects booth at PULSE.  Call it the instantaneous seduction of artwork, the hunger to throw oneself into the art-- I cast fair decorum aside and nearly jogged into the Thatcher booth to see Kunbi's paintings. 

The images here do not convey the richness of Kunbi's color schemes, how the colors jump into the eye, how he sets one block in conversation with another and with the viewer.  Kunbi layers and articulates, and unabashedly shows us the artist's hand with his brushwork.  He evokes worlds--he is an alchemist like Klee, Rothko, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler.  Kunbi had me thinking of Kandinsky on the spirituality of art.  Kunbi reminds us how powerful painting can be in the hands of a confident practitioner.  And, in an age wedded to irony and pusillanimous when it comes to any talk of artistic verities, Kunbi unironically presents us with Beauty-- surely still one of the main points of Art.

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A charcoal line, crumbly and raw, is easy to see without illusion.

When I was an undergrad, I would try to find demo tapes of bands, usually sold by street table vendors, or maybe a live album (usually referred to as a “European Release”). Some of the demo tapes were shit quality, but they usually had some edge that I craved.  The best one was a demo of the Pixies first album. It was even more Pixies than the produced release. The form was wonderfully awkward and plastic. I prefer the raw and untethered to the artificially perfect.

I don’t think there is a necessary distinction between drawing and painting. Neither is isolated. Both, always, are in flux with the world. I work between drawing and painting on purpose.  I am interested in feelings, flawed and visceral. I am fragile. I am amazed. I am thankful. It is dirty stuff...

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