FORTY YEARS! Another consideration was repetition. With recent collection and part-collection exhibitions, including Graphic Tendencies (2021), Object (2019), Drawn (2017) and Picturing Townsville (2016) as well as retrospectives for Connie Hoedt (2019), Glen O’Malley (2019) and Robert Preston (2021), I wanted to try to avoid showing works we had recently seen, but sometimes this is easier said than done. Artists such as Hoedt simply could not be left out of the exhibition, so a few exceptions were made. Luckily we had a few works of O’Malley’s in the collection that were not included in his retrospective, and there was a significant work of Bob’s that we held over from his recent retrospective. Other works almost demand to be shown as often as possible, and understanding that it likely won’t be so long until these are brought out one more, I have shied away from them, as I am sure they’ll be seen once again before too long. However, this has caused the absences of a number of artists who I think would fit very well into this exhibition. But with the curatorial suggestions that came in, I think we have managed to pull together a nicely balanced and even surprising selection. The truth of the matter is that with such a talented artistic community, it is a nigh-impossible task to include everybody that should be included.
How does one represent forty years of exhibitions, workshops, artist talks, prizes, donations, acquisitions, renovations and natural disasters? How does one represent the divine highs and soul-destroying lows of arts workers, let alone artistic practice? The only way I could think of, the only possible way, was to invite people’s thoughts, suggestions, critiques and ideas. While the project has changed since we first dreamed it up, streamlined for the sake of the team’s sanity to be a collection-only exhibition, the spirit of it is the same. This is not a ‘best of’ collection show, highlighting the most valuable or popular items of the collection (though there certainly are some of those included!). Nor is it a selection of my personal favourite collection items (though there are some of those too). Rather, in this exhibition we have attempted to sum up what it is about our collective story worth telling, through the people, places and art works of our community. The initial idea of the exhibition was to differentiate itself from the 30-year anniversary show, curated by Eric Nash, 30@30, which assembled thirty collection works, one representing each year of Perc Tucker Regional Gallery’s existence. I thought that by asking for curatorial suggestions and stories, we would be given a more nuanced, and perhaps unexpected approach to the Gallery, the collection, and what this would say about our corner of the world. One work that is shown again from 30@30 is Ian Smith’s Seaview Lunch (1981), for possibly obvious reasons, aside from simply being a great painting. It tells a story not only about Townsville, but its artistic community; a recollection of a lunch after the very first exhibition launch at the Gallery.
This process has brought to light some key artists who are, in my opinion, underrepresented, or not represented at all, in the collection. I hope that this can be remedied in the coming years. What we ended up with is just a taste of the talent we have in our region, and a teensy smidgeon of our collection. The exhibition features many of our local heroes, and artists who have had a relationship with our Gallery and our community in some way or other over the years. There are too many to list here, but thank you to those who have donated works to the City of Townsville Art Collection over the years, making it the treasure that it is.
Besides being a brilliant draftsman and painter, Smithy (apologies, ‘Smith’ just seems wrong after so many years) is a natural storyteller, and in this way his work embodies what I consider the kernel of this exhibition. For what are we, what is our art, without storytelling? In this way, Seaview Lunch kicked off this endeavour, and the rest of the curatorial really wrote itself.
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