Word: queenslanders
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They are some of the most enduring images of Australian art. Having made his home in a thatched hut on an island off the coast of Queensland, eccentric Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) began to harmonize a lifetime of influences and impulsive traveling. Mixing Taoist philosophy with Cubism, and Ab-Ex drips with Chinese calligraphy, his grandiloquent '60s works like Monastery and Monsoon transcended abstraction to become austere meditations in paint, as elemental as lightning. And all the more remarkable considering their flimsy foundations - they were often completed on carboard with the cheapest...
...Michael Stevenson, 40, has built a career from the quirks of art history, teasing them out as art-museum "exhibits." Artist or anthropologist? For the 2003 Venice Biennale, he reassembled New Zealand's failed four-wheel-drive vehicle, the Trekka, as a humorous gesture of national self-deprecation. The Queensland Art Gallery's Suhanya Raffel calls Stevenson "an archivist of culture." And to his idiosyncratic eye, Fairweather's raft is a potent symbol...
...Elam School. "The story of his life seems somewhere between Gauguin and the hippy movement, and this aspect of his practice is also important and fascinating." Through his research, Stevenson began to see himself in Fairweather. The latter lived his last two decades as a virtual recluse on Queensland's Bribie Island, and the New Zealander, who moved to Berlin in 2002, recognized in Fairweather some of his own ambivalence about the art world. (Stevenson's 2000 show, "Call Me Immendorff," skewered the champagne lifestyle of the German painter who visited Auckland in 1987.) Before his project was finished, some...
...These days, as Stevenson well knows, artistic bartering can take the form of residencies and biennales. And it is only appropriate that "The Argonauts" will voyage home to the Queensland Art Gallery (which has purchased the remainder of the work) for the Asia-Pacific Triennial next year. The event will help launch their new Gallery of Modern Art, and there is talk of a Fairweather Room for the existing gallery spaces. In this way, Stevenson's work will hover somewhere between the two galleries. "It just resonates brilliantly for us," says QAG curator Raffel. With his New Zealand navigator, Fairweather...
...residents of the small seaside town of Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia, are getting set for huge fun as the town's annual Humpback Whale Festival approaches (Aug. 6-13). A carnival and illuminated parade provide shore-based entertainment, but the real stars of the show are the humpback whales that visit this protected coastline between now and November, turning Hervey Bay into the country's top whale-watching location. The cetaceans are on their yearly migration from the warm waters off northern Queensland (where their calves are born) to Antarctica?and Hervey Bay is a favored stopover. There...