On Saturday—the opening day of Queensland Art Gallery’s show Living Patterns: Contemporary Australian Abstraction—pop-punk provocateur Scott Redford will be outside, bringing abstraction to the people.

Redford made his Iso Paintings over several years, including during Covid lockdowns. But now he’s combating isolation, reconnecting with the people, by giving away the lot for free, from 10am on the Gallery of Modern Art forecourt. But only one painting per person—don’t be greedy! And you must agree to be photographed with your new acquisition—quid pro quo! His booth closes at 4pm or when there are no works left—so come early.

While you’re on campus, take the opportunity to see Living Patterns. It includes Redford’s giant work Reinhardt Dammn: Things the Mind Already Knows (2010). This fact frames Redford’s forecourt giveaway stunt—him being at once inside the institution and out, an insider outsider, ever in two minds.
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Yesterday, I opened my friend Jacky Redgate’s exhibition Hypnagogia with Mirrors at Wollongong Art Gallery. Curated by the artist, this idiosyncratic show brings together old works, new works, and archival materials, all in conversation with each other and with the shape and history of the building. It’s on until 26 November 2023. This is what I said:

There’s a great moment in the film Casablanca. Fate has brought Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) together again. Ilsa asks Rick if he recalls the last time they were together, as lovers, that day the German tanks rolled into Paris. ‘I remember every detail’, Rick says. ‘The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.’ 

I love that line. It says so much about how we all experience the world, combining big world-historical events, which matter to everyone, with small events, which matter just to us and ours. In our own psychic world, mass invasion by fascists can be eclipsed by the hue of a lover’s frock. These things define us.

That scene in Casablanca came back to me when I was talking to Jacky Redgate during the development of this show, we’re opening today. 

But first, let me backtrack …

When I first saw Jacky’s work, in the 1980s, I was drawn by its seriousness. Her stunning photographic series Photographer Unknown, Naar Het Schilder-Boeck, and Work-to-Rule seemed cool, conceptual, and calculated, elegant and erudite. They didn’t seem autobiographical or personal. They seemed to speak to a wider-world concerns, to histories, to theories, to ideas. I was seduced by their smarts. In 1991, I organised an exhibition of her work for New Zealand, which emphasised this understanding. 

But, years later, I became aware of another side of her practice, insistently biographical and personal, focused on childhood memories, even touching on a childhood trauma. When she was three, Jacky took a turn and was hospitalised. Her mother recorded her delirious utterances in a diary. These comments became the subject of a series of surreal photographic tableaux. This series looked back to early Jacky works with psychosexual overtones—her 1970s juvenilia—that one might otherwise have assumed she had transcended.

In 2008, I made another show with Jacky at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Visions from Her Bed included some of the personal stuff, including a creepy early photo of Jacky curled up in a baby’s cot wearing a pig’s-head mask and shiny leggings. The show raised the question of how this personal dimension might have informed Jacky’s later, largely impersonal work. Its title prompted us to imagine all her work as if viewed from the hospital bed of her childhood convalescence.

In 2020, adult and baby Jackys collided spectacularly in Hold On, a photographic series made for Geelong Art Gallery. Jacky’s serious, high modernist abstractions were rudely overrun with dolls and teddy bears, playing doctors and nurses, among other things. Were these new-naughty, kitschy-kiddy works calculated to offend those who loved—and had invested in—adult Jacky? (I think of Guston disappointing his fans, when he unveiled his comic figurative paintings at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970.)

In Hypnagogia with Mirrors, Jacky has curated herself. The show includes familiar work, previously unseen work, and new work. Her childhood story is referenced in works, but also in archives. The show encompasses Jacky’s life and work, adult and baby, the impersonal and the personal, systems and symptoms—all talking to or past one another, asking us to make sense of them.

Jacky has organised these aspects of her work and life—in all their contradiction—into the symmetrical crown structure of the Wollongong Art Gallery. Things on either side mirror one another, as if pointing to similarities and differences. 

To me, it seems, her curatorial process was as much about how to pack a mental suitcase as how to tell a story. It’s as if Jacky is inviting us to rummage through the hemispheres of her brain, where the contents and where they are filed might both be important. Hypnagogia with Mirrors seems to be full of coincidences, juxtapositions, and eureka moments. But is it significance or serendipity? Your call.

The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.

[IMAGE: Jacky Redgate Wedding Wishes 1977]
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I’ve just arrived in sweaty Brisbane from windy Wellington, and my internal thermostat can’t cope with the heat and humidity. Staggering through the sculpture garden at Queensland Art Gallery, I encounter a work that speaks to my situation—perhaps ridicules it. A glass-fronted freezer contains a bulbous snowman with a quizzical expression. 

Snowman (1987–2019)—by Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss—is a deft gesture that can be endlessly unpacked, this way and that. I can confront it as alien or identify. Is it dead or alive—or, like Schrödinger’s cat, both at once? Is it in cryogenic suspension? Is it wise and kind, like Buddha (a Bodhi tree is planted nearby), or moronic and demonic? 

The Snowman may occupy its own insulated realm, a world apart, and yet Queensland Art Gallery, just metres away, is also a big glazed refrigerator, chilled for the comfort and preservation of people and things. Is the work thumbing its nose at climate change or reminding us that the gallery—indeed, the entire city—is an expensive airconditioner. 

Queensland’s Snowman is one of three. The first is installed outside Germany’s Römerbrücke power plant, whose heat keeps it cool. Another belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Queensland’s was acquired for the exhibition Water in 2019, where it was installed inside. But I find it more poignant, more funny, outside in the sculpture garden. In a place designed to view sculptures in the round under changing climate conditions, it’s a picture frozen in a frame. 

In the wretched heat, I fantasise about trading places with the snowman—watching people and seasons pass, chilling out, with a self-satisfied grin.

[IMAGE: Fischli and Weiss Snowman 1987–2019]
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