28 November 2019 – 25 January 2020
about the exhibition
Artists Alexander Boynes and Mandy Martin have collaborated over the last six years on four large public exhibitions addressing the issue of climate change. Their current project is ‘Hi-Vis Futures’, at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until 4 February 2020. ‘Slow Hope’ at Beaver Galleries is a parallel and complementary exhibition, prompted in part by a seminal essay of the same name by Christof Mauch. In a call to ‘rethink ecologies of crisis and fear’, Mauch beseeches us to believe in our power, individually and in populations, to make millions of small gestures to mitigate our carbon footprint and avert full-blown catastrophe. In the ‘Still’ series Mandy Martin pushes her signature cooling towers to the distance, coating them with hi-vis paint, sending some into oblivion behind the mountain mists of the ash forest. Tree ferns, here sprouting, there withering, seem to battle poisonous emissions. Mandy’s delicate oil representations are love letters and messages of hope to the forest, unable to escape the smoke, but frailly enduring as a complex organism.
Mandy Martin studied at the South Australian School of Art in the mid 1970s and began exhibiting in 1977. The following year she became a lecturer at the Canberra School of Art, where she taught until 2003. She has exhibited very widely in Australia and internationally including Mexico, the United States of America, France, Germany and Japan. She held a fellowship at the Australian National University from 2003 until 2008, when she became an adjunct professor at its Fenner School of Environment and Society. Her works are held in many major Australian public collections including those of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Parliament House, National Portrait Gallery and Australian War Memorial. In the USA her work is represented in the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) and Nevada Museum of Art (Reno) as well as many private collections.
