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ARTWORK: Maddy Brown
New Faces and Old Spaces: Know My Name Exhibition Review Isabella Vacaflores Nearly thirty years ago, The Guerrilla Girls quipped that the advantages of being a woman artist included “working without the pressure of success”.This criticism struck at the hypocrisy of museums and galleries who were willing to display females as subjects whilst simultaneously refusing to recognise them as artists in their own right. Significant advances in gender equality have been made since then, but this has barely translated to the art world. Curators at the National Gallery of Australia discovered this themselves upon observing that the number of pieces by living women in their collection had shrunk over the past four decades, despite the increasing prominence of female artists worldwide. Acting as a mea culpa is the newly opened Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now. The exhibition features over 400 works by 170 female-identifying individuals, with household names like Grace Cossington-Smith, Fiona Hall, and Tracey Moffatt displayed alongside lesser-known but equally skilled female artists. By showing new faces in old spaces, the exhibition presents an assault on the canon that artistic establishments operate under. Ultimately, it is a triumphant and thoughtful representation of women, their work, and their experiences, through the prism of art.
A hanging of nearly 50 portraits at the entrance of Know My Name causes a double take. From Brenda Croft’s stunning monochrome photos of a First Nations elder in Matilda (Ngambri/ Ngunnawal) (2019) to Joy Hester’s amorphous acrylic Woman With Rose (1956) and Kate Beynon’s acutely millennial self-portrait (2012), women dominate a historically patriarchal space. The sheer number of females on show implicitly sets the exhibition up to offer a pluralised understanding of the artists displayed, recognising that no two individuals are the same. The curatorial choice of thematically grouping artworks instead of organising them in conventionally teleological displays supports this. In Remembering the soft textures of Kathy Temin’s Pavilion Garden (2012) offers a different perspective to the drama of Rosemary Laing’s photographs of falling brides in Flight Research (1999) and the grungy desolation of eX de Medici’s watercolour tableau The Wreckers (2018-19). By setting aside traditional cultural and chronological boundaries, the exhibition rejects potentially exclusionary essentialist narratives of women’s experiences and highlights the intangible relationships between artists and their works.
