'Promiscuous Provenance'
Australian contemporary multimedia Artist Anna Glynn
Touring Exhibition 2018 - 2021
"...like an echo chamber capable of
metamorphosis..."
at The World Theatre Gallery
May 10 - June 30 2019
FREE ENTRY
Opening Friday 10 May 7pm . All Welcome
Watch 'Anna Glynn: The Artist Behind Promiscuous Provenance' a film by Anna Thompson here
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Black Swan / After Port Jackson Painters
This work references 'The black Swan the size of an English Swan.
Native name Mulgo' by the Port Jackson Painter 1788 – 1792,
from the First Fleet Collection, Natural History Museum, London
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" In the Promiscuous Provenance series, I indulge my perpetual
curiosity to lead me back in time to an intersection of worlds. By
re-interpreting images of the Australian colonial painters through an almost
naive playful engagement, the artworks express a nostalgia for an antipodean
wonderland before the imprint of colonization was stamped over the landscape
and its inhabitants. This is a world of fantasia, a place on the cusp of
reality and imagination, populated by bizarre reimagined hybrid characters and
featuring strange natural history tableaux. In essence this is a fantasy
leading us to reflect and to reawaken our sense of wonder with our surrounding
environment and contemplate the reality of this period of history." Anna Glynn
“In these images, the historical layers continue to build,
and Glynn’s treatment evokes, accepts and extends agency to all of those who
have gone before, like an echo chamber capable of metamorphosis, it offers a
voice to those who were voiceless.”
Louise Martin-Chew, 2018
"In her repositioning of early and precolonial works
she has, in some fashion, connected aspects of Sydney Aboriginal cave art and
her own work. The traditional Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney basin have left
behind many thousands of art works and there are several traditional
representations of the Aboriginal perspective on contact with colonial
women." Les Bursill,OAM, historian, archaeologist, anthropologist,
publisher and Aboriginal Elder
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Colonial Hybrid Reimagined from
Raper Gum plant kangooroo New Holland 1789
A reimagination of George Raper's 'Gum-plant,
& kangooroo of New-Holland' 1789 First Fleet Collection,
Natural History Museum, London
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"...Her sometimes surprising and disorienting
combinations of historical and contemporary subjects insert history into the
present. And the present into history. They remind us of just how wondrous and
alienating the Australian landscape was, so puzzling and new it seemed almost
the stuff of fairy tales.
Her work extends the motif of copying which has only
recently become a central part of the story of art practice in the colony,
copying not as forgery or of something lesser, but rather as a valid and
valuable way of circulating drawings, as a way of responding to the fascination
of the new, of feeding the appetite of gentlemen collectors to possess their
own drawings and to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Anna’s work is interested
in the authority of images and the historically loaded tradition of
drawing."
Louise Anemaat, Head, Pictures Section at State Library of
NSW
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Antipodean Wonderland Tableaux Stubbs Dingo
A reimagination of George Stubbs 'Dingo from New Holland'
(1768–71) National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
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Promiscuous Provenance encourages a re-examining of our
relationship with our colonial past. Glynn is drawn to the work of the early
colonial artists, including John Hunter, the Port Jackson Painter, and George
Raper. As artists seeing a new world of flora and fauna for the first time,
their works illustrate the strangeness of this encounter; in his 1789 journal,
John Hunter describes the creatures he sees as coming about through ‘a
promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all these different
animals’.
Through an amalgamation of historical imagery both real and
reimagined she elaborates on Hunter’s idea of “promiscuous intercourse” to
create her own antipodean world populated by creatures, hybrid manifestations
of colonial fauna illustration and surviving costumery, animated and rendered
bringing them to life in the 21st century as artefacts of the imagination,
objects of wonder and curiosity.
For an artist working in the 21st century, the inability of
these artists to see the Australian landscape as it was, but rather to
represent their alien surroundings using known forms and animal shapes from
Europe, is both beguiling and symbolic. Is our identity as Australians built on
a strange hybrid history, a ‘Promiscuous Provenance’?
Promiscuous Provenance featured in Doryanthes -
A Journal of History, Heritage and the Arts - see pages 9 & 10
"...Glynn repositions colonial and pre-colonial art, creating a hybrid
that questions and repositions the iconic notions we have of western art, in
particular colonial and indigenous art."
https://annaglynn.com/Promiscuous_Provenance.html
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