Unfamiliar Terrain

Some artists look at the land;
others ask what it means to look.

Across photography, painting and mixed media, Unfamiliar Terrain reframes the landscape. From atmospheric and imagined forests to storm clouds, wetlands, migration and the traces of human intervention; between the intimate and the expansive, these works invite us to look again and to see differently.

Featuring Michael Cook, Reanna Emanouel, Ari Fuller, Langaliki Lewis, Rosella Namok, Paula Payne, Paula Quintela, Pamela See and Amy Vowles, the exhibition brings together works from both the first and secondary market, offering an opportunity to acquire from a carefully curated collection of established and emerging Australian artists.

Paula Quintela

Latin American born artist Paula Quintela, trained in Painting, Printmaking and Photography in Chile and Canada before making Brisbane her home. She has exhibited in Chile, France, Argentina, New York and Hong Kong and was the recipient of the 2018 Clayton Utz Art Award.

Her works explore displacement through an intermingling of poetic, literary and domestic references. This new body of work explores resilience through transformation, drawing on the forms of native Australian plants that thrive in harsh environments. Suspended between growth and decay, the plants evoke an inner landscape where memory, spirit, and the natural world are deeply intertwined.

Michael Cook

Michael Cook employs the camera to bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photograph is, for Cook, that imaginary place of possibility where viewers are free to make their own inquiries, explore feelings, and test their relationship to aspects of Australia’s colonial history.

Michael Cook was adopted at birth into a non-Indigenous family. While cut off from the connection to his biological and social Aboriginal heritage, he was fortunate enough to have an adoptive mother who embraced his Aboriginality and empowered him to imagine what that might mean for him and for the world he lived in.

Michael Cook has won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography People’s Choice Award and was also a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize. His artworks are held in all major Australian collections, and in significant international collections, including the British Museum, London.

Mona Ryder
Earthly Delights

A selection of works spanning several decades. Rarely presented within a commercial context.

Exhibition Dates: May 23 - July 4
Opening Event: Sat 23 May:
6 pm - 8 pm

to be opened by Vanessa Van Ooyen
Director - QUT Art Museum