Midsumma’s visual arts convenor, Tim Bateson, talks to Lucy Elliott about this year’s high calibre program.
For 20 years, the Midsumma Festival has been entertaining, challenging and exciting Melbourne audiences.
An integral component of the festival is its visual arts program. The hard work that’s put into programming this year’s art exhibitions allows queer artists to engage with diverse audiences and, in the process, develop their own art practices.
The artists, whether emerging or mid-career artists, have been selected on the merits of their ideas, the professionalism of their practice, and their dedication to the visual arts community in general.
“We’ve had a very clear directive not to search specifically for queer content this year,” explains Tim Bateson, the convenor of Midsumma’s visual arts working group.
“We’ve brought high calibre people like Troy-Anthony Baylis across from Adelaide; [he] has just had a show in Berlin; and William Yang, represented in the Men like Me show, who is still probably one of Australia’s most toured artists.”
Whilst Bateson and the other members of the working group have worked hard to lift the profile of slightly more established queer artists, they are also passionately committed to working with people who have come forward and said ‘I’m part of the community and I’d like to get involved or have a show’.
“One of the initiatives this year is to work with some artists that were unsuccessful in their application through workshops held at both a studio space in Johnston Street, and at the [Abbotsford] Convent. The workshops will cover things as simple as working with application funding. Others will be about approaching galleries, and … will be practice based, and they will be about presenting work, making work, and that whole finished finesse that is required by an artist wanting to put a show together.”
The visual arts program at Midsumma this year is massive, and brings together artists from all parts of the world.
There’s a strong presence of gender-bending art including A Night at the Star, reviewed in this week’s ‘Art Matters’ column (see p18), as well as some strong shows questioning cultural differences.
One of the highlights every year is the Queer City program at venues FortyFive Downstairs, the City Library, Platform Art Spaces, Majorca Windows and The Carlton Hotel Studios.
At FortyFive Downstairs (45 Flinders Lane, City) David Lehmann, Tim Craker and Tim Bateson have installed works that employ diverse media to remarkable effect. Lehmann takes images from chat rooms and converts them, through hand-beading, into iconic precious objects.
“They are quite extraordinary, and they have a real meditative quality,” Bateson says of Lehmann’s work. “The beads are about pixels and resolutions but they are also about the history of beads as more tribal.”
Tim Craker’s piece is an installation based on cultural differences, which uses food as a metaphor. It’s a net-like ephemeral installation constructed out of plastic knives, forks and chopsticks called Mixed Marriage, with the cutlery used to represent the types of foods common across different cultures.
Tim Bateson’s own abstract work is very much based on the colours and nuances found in rural Victoria.
“Each picture has a different location,” the artist adds. “So they might relate to the colours and textures of some reeds around a pond or the side of a tin shed.”
City Library (253 Flinders Lane, City) is showcasing the work of Troy-Anthony Baylis, an indigenous gay artist who uses knitting as his medium to create large landscapes.
In the old advertising windows now used to showcase art at Platform (Degraves Street Subway, City) Josefine Kristensen displays a series of work previously shown in the 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Homophobia/Queer Pride, that playfully look at the consumerism of sexuality.
On show in Platform’s Majorca Building Cabinets in nearby Centre Place is Melbourne artist Andrea Van Steen’s drag king inspired photography; while the Carlton Hotel Studios (level two, 193 Bourke Street, City) are given over to a group show, Broke, where artists such as Marcus Keating, Pip Shea and Glenn Walls tackle the challenges we all face in our physically and emotionally deteriorating world.
Another Midsumma highlight is the Men like Me photography exhibition at Off the Kerb Gallery (66b Johnston Street, Collingwood). Here, curator Garrie Maguire has brought together eight artists from Australia, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong to explore the Asian aesthetic in terms of the male figure and the nude.
Gasworks Arts Park (21 Graham Street, Albert Park) have a strong program this year, including the Transmen Translated show. Curator and artist Jesslyn Moss has collected works that explore the female to male transition experience, through video and photography. Moss’s own work can be viewed at the Anita Traverso Gallery (7 Albert Street, Richmond). Titled Body Doubles, Moss’ photographic exhibition confronts gender dysphoria in an engaging and challenging way.
The passion people like Tim Bateson have for the Midsumma visual art program is vital to the success of Midsumma in general.
As Tim Bateson says, “It’s not just only what happens during three weeks in January. This is actually a commitment to work and support queer artists across Melbourne during the entire year.”
Midsumma Visual Arts Catalogues are available for $2 at participating galleries.
Midsumma’s visual arts convenor, Tim Bateson, talks to Lucy Elliott about this year’s high calibre program.
