STEPHEN
COPLAND: LONGITUDE/LATITUDE
Gosford Regional Gallery
Exhibition Dates: February 8th
February - March 30th 2014
Curated by Kon Gouriotis OAM and Meredith Brice
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.