Sunday 2 March 2014

Longitude/Latitude


STEPHEN COPLAND: LONGITUDE/LATITUDE

Gosford Regional Gallery

Exhibition Dates: February 8th February - March 30th 2014


Curated by Kon Gouriotis OAM and Meredith Brice

For 10 years Australian artist Stephen Copland (b.1950) has been developing Longitude/Latitude. In this exhibition the artist has re-imagined arts relationship to community by discovering new ways to confront perceptions of migration and evoke audiences.
In presenting this exhibition for the first time the curators Meredith Brice and Kon Gouriotis have purposely responded to the Gosford Regional Gallery.  It was developed in close discussion with the artist and the Gallery team. 
Stephen Copland has combined the autobiographical and historical in an interdisciplinary approach. Here the artist combines his years of knowledge and experience from many disciplines to articulate the complexity of migration. His concern is with the communication of and the struggle for socially and culturally disempowered communities.  In a global era of asylum seekers and boat people the artist is probing Australian attitudes on border protection and the fear of the other.
A critical metaphor in Longitude/Latitude is Théodore Géricault's (1791-1824) The Raft of the Medusa, (1818-1819). The artist first viewed this painting in 1976. In 2011 the Art Gallery of NSW awarded him the Moya Dyring Studio, Cite Internationale des Artes, Paris. This residency enabled him to continue his research into Géricault's work in the Musée du Louvre. In a corner of this exhibition he has recreated the studio to explain the creative process of transformation that has informed the presentation of this extraordinary exhibition.