‘Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes’ delivers exactly what its show name promises; an exploration into how art can take our imagination beyond the limitations of the veil of visual appearances.
The show embraces instability and recognises forms of erasure, as well as new realms of possibility. The thought-provoking selection of works by contemporary Latin American and Australian artists critically engages with unacknowledged or difficult histories, and the impacts on our changing society and natural environments.
Heide Museum of Modern Art senior curator Melisa Keys says, ‘We are proud to be able to bring together artists with distinctive practices from a diverse range of backgrounds in order to offer new and imaginative perspectives on intertwining local and universal themes.’
In the exhibition you’ll find work from Australian artist Lauren Brincat, whose site specific installation, ‘Backstage’ both acknowledges the emotional, cognitive and physical labour involved in the production of art, and invites audiences to think about how we mentally prepare for and rehearse social encounters.
Another Australian artist, Nicholas Mangan, tackles the ongoing impacts of colonialism and humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural environment in his memorial for the lost and threatened corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
Meanwhile, Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca traces fields of tension between Peru’s ancestral knowledge and the new demands of industrialisation through her large-scale woven copper wall sculpture, ‘La Red III (Network III)’.
Melisa says, ‘Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes encourages dynamic cross-cultural conversations between the artists and with the audience [in] an exciting display of important, socially critical and searching work.’
‘Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes’ is open until Sunday 22 October. Buy tickets to the exhibition here, and check out the Winter at Heide deal (which gets you a delicious meal made from produce in the Heide garden plus a ticket to the museum for $25!)
