Alexandra Lawson Art Gallery to launch outLANDS exhibiton this week

With an exciting new exhibition opening this week, this month is shaping up to be a celebration of colour, frienship and country at Toowoomba’s Alexandra Lawson Gallery.

NEW EXHIBITION: Dr Alexandra Lawson at the opening of the Alexandra Lawson Gallery. Picture: Bev Lacey

Alexandra Lawson Gallery on Ruthven Street is preparing to welcome its next exciting art exhibition which opens later this week.

outLAND is a body of work by two artists and long time friends who visually traverse their artistic journeys via geographic movements over a period of almost 30 years.

Through various modes of drawing and painting, both Jude Roberts and Tarn McLean draw inspiration from topographical elements and the pigments, ochres, and waters predominantly located around the Western Queensland regions of Australia.

outLAND is evocative of location, where both artists lived beyond the urban terrain on adjoining remote properties. The title serves as a disruption to perceptions of the inland, to the physical and constructed boundaries, and to placing the artists themselves into the land and waterscapes.

About the artists

Tarn McLean

My practice is concerned with painterly properties at their most fundamental level including pigment, colour, shape, line, form and perspective.

With a focus on colour and its perspectival movement upon random placement, my Colour Series works are reflective of the spatial organisation of colour, revealing how its combination interacts with and effects visual perception.

Through this, pictorial illusion is replaced by a purity of constructed form as seen in my other works that sit outside the frame.

Tarn McLean at The Artist As Culture Producer at Toowoomba City Library.

These works include shaped canvases, textile design and wall paintings, as well as my current Seeing Painting series, which links directly with painterly possibilities in fashion and product design as well as architecture.

My paintings are engaged with the transparency of the canvas and layers of pigment that prompt the viewer to look a little longer, to take their time with ‘seeing’ the experience rather than gazing at the digital image.

How can painting offer a way to disrupt the viewer’s way of seeing and experiencing the world around them on a more active and conceptual level?

My dialogue is open to the possibilities that the screen is favourable to muting these interpretative behaviours, while perhaps it is painting that continues to engage and challenge them.

outLAND is the new body of work coming to the Alexandra Lawson Gallery. The two artists and long time friends, Jude Roberts and Tarn McLean visually traverse their artistic journeys via geographic movements over a period of almost 30 years.

Jude Taggart Roberts

With rapidly changing environments of inland Australia, the processes of drawing and print media I use not only document this acceleration but seek a visceral knowledge often dismissed in many contemporary societies. Methods include a range of marks, and materials.

Disused agricultural or industrial detritus are used as graphical tools while found or processed mediums are printed, stained, pressed or forced across and into the absorbency of paper surfaces.

Historically, intuition has formed a critical knowledge of our drive to navigate lands.

By researching drawing methods to visualise the hidden interrelationships of rivers and groundwater systems the works on paper become a larger narrative of the Murray Darling and Basin systems.

outLAND is the new body of work coming to the Alexandra Lawson Gallery. Through various modes of drawing and painting, both Jude Roberts and Tarn McLean draw inspiration from topographical elements and the pigments, ochres, and waters predominantly located around the Western Queensland regions of Australia.

Opening Night – Friday, May 7, 6pm – all welcome

Wine Pairing and Artist Talk – Sunday, May 23, 5pm – $40 a head, book here

Exhibition runs May 7 – May 31