Bonita Ely: Future Tense

Publication details

Paperback, 240 mm (H) x 170 mm (W), 32 pp text and 4pp cover, 21 pp image plates, ISBN 9781925455953

Author and/or Editor name/s

Authors: Jacqueline Chlanda, Bonita Ely and Angela Goddard

Copy editor: Evie Franzidis

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Angela Goddard is the Director of Griffith University Art Museum and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University, responsible for the University’s art collection and exhibition and related programming of the gallery space situated on the South Bank Campus, which is also the site of the Queensland College of Art. She joined the University in June 2015, after fifteen years at QAGOMA, seven of these as Curator of Australian Art. She is on the board of Shelia: A Foundation for Women in Visual Art.

Recent curatorial projects include ‘Bonita Ely: Future Tense’, ‘Boundary Lines’, ‘Davida Allen: In the Moment’, ‘Archie Moore: 1970-2018’, ‘Jenny Watson: Chronicles’, and ‘Brutal Truths: Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Bennett, Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser’ (with Naomi Evans). In her time at QAGOMA, she curated ‘Sam Fullbrook: Delicate Beauty’, 2014, ‘Ian Fairweather: Late works 1953-74’, 2012-13, and ‘Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox’, 2011.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Queensland

Abstract

Bonita Ely is recognised as a leading voice within contemporary art practice in Australia and internationally since the 1970s. The intellectual and artistic groundings of her practice are diverse, encompassing feminist methodologies, Fluxus, speculative fiction, Taoist teachings, conceptual art, parody, museum displays and scientific typologies.

Bonita Ely: Future Tense brings together several works that propose darkly humorous dystopian futures and hybrid evolutions wrought by environmental degradation and genetic engineering. Each project centres around parodic combinations of different species—such as locust/human, rabbit/snail – and reflects our desires, fears, manipulation and emotional connection with other species. Ely’s works are not only inherently futurist and speculative, they are often also iterative, building upon previous showings. This exhibition includes two new configurations of installations, as well as several historical works that date from or document earlier projects.

This publication features full colour installation images, as well as new writing by curator Angela Goddard, an interview with Ely and art historian Jacqueline Chlanda, and a reproduction of Ely’s short speculative fiction text We Live to be Surprised from 1989.