Year of the Bird Catalogue

Maitland Regional Art Gallery was a big winner this year in the  Museums Australia Multimedia and Publication Design Awards (the MAPDAs)

Maitland picked up the Multimedia and Publication Design Awards in the Corporate, Poster (Paperworks | Nine Exhibitions), Website and Exhibition Branding (Versus 2012 / Blue vs Red, Battle of the Pigments) categories. It also managed to be Highly Commended for Exhibition Branding and Exhibition Catalogue (twice).

The Year of the Bird exhibition was also captured by the award winning team at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and with particular thanks to designer, Clare Hodgins for her clever fold-out catalogue.

Please feel free to download a copy below.

Download the YOTB Catalogue as a Screen resolution PDF

Heral Review of Year of the Bird

Alas the forums for discussion and review of exhibitions are scarce in the Hunter Valley, and most often limited to a few lines at best, but Jill Stowell kindly mentioned the exhibition in the Herald column last week.

(Apologies to Kate and Merle, we know you are from further away than Tasmania!)

Just click on the image below for a larger version.

Herald review 30 March 2013

Year of the Bird flown by...

Year of the Bird has indeed flown by quickly so we just wanted to thank the artists who generously agreed to loan work to the exhibition. Much appreciation extended to Emma van Leest, Pamela See, Kate Foster & Merle Patchett, Trevor Weekes, Helen Wright, Vanessa Barbay, Marian Drew, and David Hampton.

Enormous thanks also to the Maitland Regional Art Gallery team, particularly Jo Eisenberg and Kim Blunt for their faith in the show, and also Lisa Kirkpatrick, Braddon Snape, and the MRAG volunteers for their work in installing the exhibition - Thank you from Caelli and Helen!

Below are some more installation shots from the gallery.

 

 

Maitland Mercury Article YOTB

Emma Swain from the Maitland Mercury popped by as we were installing to interview Helen and myself about the exhibition. We were still curating, so we roped Lisa Kirkpatrick in for the photo as we pretended to decide on our favorite David Hamptons (which is of course, all of them!)

Please click on the image below for a more readable version.

Maitland Mercury article 21 February 2013

Invitation to the opening celebration

Everyone is welcome to the opening celebration for the Year of the Bird exhibition.

Dr Rod Bennison, the Minding Animals International CEO, will be saying a few words at the opening.

Several other shows are also opening at the same time so it should be a good afternoon. for further details see the MRAG site.

www.mrag.org.au

Please click on the invitation for a larger sized option

YOTB Work in Progress... Caelli Jo Brooker

Some preliminary sketches for Caelli Jo Brooker's work for Year of the Bird.

"...Our relationship with the bird is complex. We have a long cultural history of using birds decoratively, symbolically, narratively, allegorically and consuming them literally and metaphorically through advertising, art, commerce and fashion.

My work for Year of the Bird borrows from mythological, literary and popular culture representations of birds and re-imagines them in abstracted imaginary ‘field studies’. These large scale painted drawings are also personal interpretations of the museological and presentational aspects of natural history traditions, incorporating abstract note-taking, anatomy and typography. References to these borrowed traditions are woven with more contemporary mythos, reflecting the bird’s ongoing place in our collective cultural psyche..."

Sketches for Abstract Mythological Field Studies 2012
watercolour and crayon on paper
42 x 29.7 cm (each)

Year of the Bird at MRAG 2013

Year of the Bird
22 February - 7 April 2013
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW Australia

‘Year of the Bird’ (YOTB), is a group exhibition exploring the prevalence of bird imagery in contemporary art and features the work of Marian Drew, Kate Foster (UK), Emma Van Leest, Pamela See, Vanessa Barbay, Trevor Weekes, Helen Wright, David Hampton and the curators, Helen Hopcroft and Caelli Jo Brooker.

Thematically the exhibition explores themes of nature versus culture, wildlife as elegy, representations of non-human animals, and birds as potent signifiers of both human and environmental issues.