The Wollongong Art Gallery, located in Wollongong Australia presents Boundary Strider which will be on display September 3rd – November 27th
The exhibit celebrates a provocative fusion of metaphysical transformation and ecological interconnectivity. Merging mythic universes with the natural world, Boundary Strider presents a dynamic group of 11 International and Australian painters. Among which is FSU Art Department Professor Carrie Ann Baade whos work has been described as being “autobiographical parables combining fragments of Renaissance and Baroque religious paintings, resulting in surreal landscapes inhabited by exotic flora, fauna, and figures.”
In an age where images and text are generated and disseminated at unparalleled speed and volume, when prime mythopoetic visual experience is either a distant memory animated by ironic interpretation, or belonging to the non-Western other, Boundary Strider arrives with a different vision – one where anthropomorphic and fantastic imagery challenges those perspectives which flatten a multiplicitous otherness by a willful blindness and deafness to anything that does not speak in words.
In the context of this exhibition, the term boundary strider refers to those who exist on the outskirts of a community – the outliers who not constrained by convention continue to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual, mythical, or mystical themes. The artworks in Boundary Strider break through the everyday and mundane views of life and reality, providing visual conduits for alternate fantastical and visionary artistic experience. Embedded with non-linear elements of time, improbable creatures, and spiritual, mythical, and mystical symbolism, the artworks in this exhibition collide in unique often astonishing ways.
Speaking of the work in Boundary Strider Carrie Ann comments on the attention to details in the works explaining them as being “painstakingly hand-wrought, containing many concepts.” In her work “The Allegory of G(o)od Government” she paint an optimistic future which conceives government in terms of planetary (r)evolution: a spiritual and ethical process of transfiguration. In Baade’s political universe, government is inherently concerned with renewal and rebirth. It is a matter of cosmic guidance and a matter of reflexivity that involves tuning into and trusting something bigger than ourselves. G(o)od Government upholds a cyclical process in which we weigh up our virtues and motivations in order to reset, recalibrate, realign, and choose other courses or pathways.