Dear Minister for Women: Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers. Curator Craig Judd — 20 June to 18 July 2015
#DearMinisterforWomen – appropriate and re-imagine the future
Cross conversation: Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers with curator Craig Judd on Saturday 20 June 2015 at 3pm.
Exhibition dates: 20 June to 18 July 2015.
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers are subversives. While both maintain significant individual art practices, they have been collaborationists for over ten years making work that challenges and ultimately explodes the taxonomies of masculinist hetero-normativity.
Dear Minister for Women is their latest collaborative installation. Through their single, collegiate and collaborative practices they make work that undermines the taxonomies of masculinist hetero-normative orthodoxies.
Alongside the exhibition, Walsh and Meijers hope that an online ephemeral archive will emerge as visitors share their anger and disbelief with the current political climate through the hashtag #DearMinisterforWomen. They see this tool as continuing the process of appropriation and re-imagining that our time demands.
Based in Hobart and regarded as having installation practices, they have responded to curator Craig Judd’s challenge to make an explicitly political show. In Dear Minister for Women, Walsh and Meijers range across their materials — video, linocut, clay, photography and textiles — to invoke the heroines of their lives and imaginations. The Wicked Witch of the West, nineties icon Riot Girl, Louise Bourgeois, Pussy Riot and their video collaborators all have a part in their evolving feminist and queer genealogies. Pastel and fluoro, high and low, jostle in interwoven scenarios that use the unofficial, the vernacular and the hand-made as connectors between protest and the carnivalesque.
Walsh and Meijers state: We are constructing a visual archive from recent current affairs and forgotten historical facts in an attempt to make history present and accountable.
Dear Minister for Women is using the concept of the hashtag as a collective curatorial archiving tool and appropriating internet memes for their critical immediacy and their accessibility, while reimagining them using traditional art-forms (drawing, painting, comics, ‘zines, banner-making, textiles) in this physical space.
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers, One does not, 2015.
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers, War Paint, 2015.
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers, Dear Minister for Women, Video (still) 2015.
About
Tricky Walsh
Tricky Walsh is an interdisciplinary artist who works both collaboratively and in a solo capacity. Her projects tend to be focused on both spatial and communication concerns and while she uses a diversity of media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film, comics, radio) it is foremost the concept at hand that determines which form of material experimentation occurs within these broader themes.
She has been awarded a Qantas Foundation Art Encouragement award and won the 2009 Hobart Art prize for her sculpture The Wasp project, has been commissioned to make new works for Monash University Museum of Art, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the privately funded Detached Cultural Organisation, was included in the 2013 Mona Foma festival, organised by the Museum of Old and New Art. She has been a recipient of Australia Council and Arts Tasmania funding, was recently awarded an Australia Council London residency and has previously undertaken residencies in New York, Jogjakarta and Paris. She has exhibited extensively throughout Tasmania, Australia and Overseas.
Mish Meijers
Meijers is a visual artist whose practice examines the convergence of skill and non-skill. She distorts the inherent worth and significance of objects and images with regard to popular culture, gender determination and functionality, in an alchemic and at times discordant sensibility.
Meijers divides her time between a solo and collaborative practice. The ongoing collaborative project The Collector Project now is in its ninth year with artist Tricky Walsh based on a fictional character Henri Papin. The team create large immersive installations to service the authentication of the character and his/her quirks. Henri is currently in a state of gender transition.
Further to this Meijers has had several project collaborations and communal projects, The Holy Trinity with Walsh and Alicia King, The Pick-Up Artists with Sally Rees. Together Meijers and Walsh initiated and ran 6a ARI in Hobart 2007–2011. Notable 6a projects included Battery Operated and Supercharger at Nextwave and a joint Asia link and Next-wave residency in Jogjakarta showing Machine no 6 at Sangkring Art Space.
Meijers received Australia Council mid-career funding has been a finalist in the following; Hobart Art Prize, The Substation Prize, The Paul Guest drawing prize, The Churchie Prize. She has exhibited and held residencies in New York, and in Paris, and was awarded a CAST studio resident. She was awarded the 2012 Qantas Foundation Art Encouragement award and has been commissioned for new works for Gertrude Contemporary Gallery, Monash University Museum of Art and Detached Cultural Organisation, and included in the 2013 Mona Foma festival. She has been a recipient of numerous Australia Council and Arts Tasmania funds and the Rosamund McCulloch studio award in the Cite Des Arts in Paris. Meijers work is held in public and private collections.
Conversation with Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers with curator Craig Judd, Saturday 20 June 2015
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers, 2015.
Conversation with Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers with curator Craig Judd, Saturday 20 June 2015
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers, War on hair. Wow! (video, 3:19.) from Dirty Pillows, 2015. Pillows and 3 videos.
Lake and Barwick, Join the F Team, 2015. 4 silky jerseys with flag
Roberts and Barnes, Join the F Team, 2015. 4 silky jerseys with flag
Links
Tricky Walsh is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania, and MARS Gallery in Melbourne
War on Hair – wow – https://vimeo.com/130865855
Angry Ladies – https://vimeo.com/131754239