Hold, Everything.
Student Curator, UQ Art Museum, December 3 2018 – May 19 2019.
Artists featured: Paul Adair, Benjamin Armstrong, Mikala Dwyer, Rosie Miller, Caroline Rothwell, Koji Ryui, Alex Seton, Judith Wright.
Taylor Hall was selected as one of three University of Queensland students studying Contemporary Art Curation to bring her curatorial research to life in the museum’s exhibition Summer Mixers.
Press:
Hold, Everything closely examines the qualities of material that inform how we experience sculptural objects. The exhibition focuses on the evocative and tactile nature of textured surfaces, indicating their material characteristics through interactions with light, and through varying finishes, forms, and other perceptible qualities.
Owing to its three-dimensional nature, sculpture continuously demands material exploration. The works in this exhibition encourage us to imagine an object’s weight, its temperature, consistencies, and irregularities across its surface. Humans are physical beings and the desire to touch is embedded in the desire to gather information. Hold, Everything treats sculptural material as information, understanding that paper, clay, glass, marble, and wood are coded and may signify class, capitalism, and gender, among other things.
This exhibition’s title is borrowed and altered from the title of Benjamin Armstrong’s sculpture Hold everything dear I 2008. It draws inspiration from Armstrong’s understanding of the humanness of materials. The wax and glass of Hold everything dear I reacts to light, acting almost as a skin, its surface simultaneously imbued with humility and tenderness. Armstrong articulates this relationship as a “vision made tangible”. He describes the phenomenon of the material through optical interaction, with the viewer’s eye-line compared to invisible arms and hands. Additionally, to ‘hold, everything’ is a call to pause, to stop in one’s tracks, both physically and conceptually. It asks viewers to consider each work’s material potential and its complex networks.
