Arthur Streeton Sirius Cove c1890 oil on cedar panel 12.0 x 22.3 cm State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased 1975
Colonization & Wilderness: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting - 27-28 September 2016
An international symposium held at Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia, convened by Emeritus Professor Richard Read
An international symposium organised by the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and the Visual Arts, University of Western Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
This two-day symposium with leading scholars from America, Australia and Europe will provide innovative intercultural exchange on aesthetic and environmental issues prompted by thirty original American and Australian nineteenth-century landscape paintings brought together in Continental Shift (30 July 2020 - 5 February 2021), an exhibition from the collections of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.
The focus will be on the vexed relationship between environmental change and aesthetic innovation as colonial settlements supplanted indigenous territories and wilderness across both countries. Eighteen years after the pioneering exhibition New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes took place at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra *, this symposium revisits its themes from the new perspective of Anthropocenic studies that have revolutionised disciplinary relations between the sciences and the humanities in recent years. Speakers will explore the complex relationship between clearing the land, celebrating settlement and worshipping the sublimity of nature through a genre of art that with various degrees of optimism and anxiety developed uniquely materialist potentialities and new methods of distribution and display for reinterpreting the environmental, literary, religious, scientific, perceptual, economic, indigenous, conservationist, technical, military and geo-political relations of colonial modernity in both countries.
Speakers include Professor David Peters Corbett (Courtauld Institute, London and University of East Anglia), Associate Professor Rachael Z. DeLue (Princeton University), Dr David Hansen (Australian National University), Professor Kenneth Haltmann (University of Oklahoma), Chris Peace (Western Australian artist), Dr Ruth Pullin (University of Melbourne), Emeritus Professor Richard Read, Symposium Convener (University of Western Australia) and Professor Catherine Speck (University of Adelaide).
* Julie K. Brown, review (2000), New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Paintings, exhibition (1998): ‘Placing the art of these countries side by side should be seen not as a finished statement, but the first phase of a much larger project, the beginning of a new dialogue for cultural historians of both countries.’
For further information please see the AGWA website: http://artgallery.wa.gov.au/exhibitions/symposium.asp
The full program is available here (pdf): http://www.artgallery.wa.gov.au/exhibitions/documents/160065Symposium.pdf
REGISTRATION
Members of the public, students and postgraduate students are particularly welcome to attend.
Registration is free, but bookings essential, early registration is advised to secure a place. Register HERE
Queries in relation to this symposium can be emailed to admin@artgallery.wa.gov.au