Opening this Friday at the Cooroy Butter Factory Arts Centre are two exhibitions that will be on display until 15 October.
The Creative Generation – Excellence Awards in Visual Arts is an extensive annual exhibition promotes and recognises excellence in senior visual arts education in our region and is one part of a Queensland wide exhibition and awards program. Award winners from each region are then selected to take part in an exhibition each year at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane. The exhibition reveals the breadth of the visual arts and includes video, film and electronic imaging, as well as ceramics, costume and stage design, drawing, environmental design, fibre arts, graphic design, installation, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, product design and sculpture. This award program has raised community awareness of the degree of sophistication in concepts, diversity of technical competence, and the high standard of visual art education in Queensland secondary schools.
The program is proudly delivered in partnership with Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).
The second exhibition, Quietude is a Place by Mandy McGuire is a divergent body of work from collage and small assemblages to large sculptural responses and has made precious that which most would discard. For Mandy, objects hold sentiment, history and animism, and many of the works in this solo exhibition are assembled from ordinary, even mundane, objects gathered over the years and arranged like individual recollections and imaginings of place. The process is one of persuasive manipulation; the artist has observed and arranged the objects with reflective intuition. Here, individual arrangements have become deeply personal snap shots. Narrative and metaphorical, each of the artworks invite internal meanderings and a particular quietude.
Sunshine Coast artist, Mandy McGuire, has been creating Art for over 30 years and has exhibited her work in both solo and group shows nationally. Her media and technique are diverse, but her themes remain consistent: deeply felt connections with place are conveyed through personal symbology, narrative devices and mostly figurative imagery. Her works have been described as rich, metaphorical and poetic. Most recent exhibitions have featured paintings of trees as spiritual symbols of change to our environment and thus the future.
