Catalogue – Barbara Cleveland | Thinking Business
Barbara Cleveland | Thinking Business, was presented at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery from 9 oct. – 14 nov. 2020. The accompanying catalogue features an introduction by former Gallery Director, Gina Mobayed with essays by Tara McDowell, Verónica Tello, José Da Silva and Amelia Wallin.
The catalogue is a sixty two page accompaniment to the exhibition with a complete list of works and stunning images of the works on exhibition. Catalogue designed by Garbett Designs and edited by Dianna Baker-Smith and Kate Blackmore.
Friendship, along with cooperation, relationality, networking and sharing, becomes co-opted as an immaterial asset upon which productive labor depends. However, friendship is a labour process that reproduces itself both for and against the dominant capitalist culture. Friendship is political and sacrificial.
Thinking Business Catalogue AuthorPerhaps we might also consider the best of friendships to be openings. They enable us to see the world in very particular ways. They are reflective and shield us from external forces. They are possibilities for new beginnings.
Thinking Business Catalogue AuthorVerónica assumes Di sent the link because This is a stained glass window is about to open in Sydney, and Verónica will miss it while she is conducting research in Santiago. She presses play. It is an evocative and often melancholic reflection on the friendships that make up Barbara Cleveland—their fragility, stubbornness. When the video fades to black, Verónica realises she hasn’t even taken a breath.
Thinking Business Catalogue AuthorI love the title of the work by the way—This is a stained glass window—and how sweet and simple its metaphor is: redolent of rose-coloured glasses, conjuring the ways in which glass, like friendship, is always in a liquid state, even though it looks solid.
Thinking Business Catalogue AuthorEach work is a vital inclusion and a marker of commitment from each member of Barbara Cleveland, directed by four strong and intellectual artists: Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley.
Thinking Business CuratorIn watching the works in Thinking Business we continually discover Barbara Cleveland’s commitment in making work as a collective, to the idea and reality of artists creating together.
Thinking Business CuratorCATALOGUE AUTHORS
José Da Silva is Director of UNSW Galleries, Sydney. He previously led the Australian Cinémathèque at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, presenting a diverse program of international moving-image and media art, and contributed to an ambitious program of exhibitions and projects at QAGOMA for more than a decade.
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Founding Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. Recent projects include co-editing The Artist As (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018) and her book The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2018 CAA Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award.
Verónica Tello is a Chilean-Australian writer and art historian based in Sydney. She is currently researching queer and transnational collaborations forged by Chilean and Australian arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990) and, with Diana Baker Smith, how national collections order visuality and gender.
Amelia Wallin is a curator, writer and currently Director of West Space in Melbourne. With a focus on care, feminisms and reproductive labour, Amelia is concerned with alternative models for instituting.
When I first set out to think about female friendship, I turned to philosophy, and found hardly anything there... There’s a connection between this refusal to admit the possibility of female friendship and the systematic, violent suppression that occurred throughout much of Western history of ‘wise women,’ the healers and midwives that were later called witches and murdered en masse. That shared thing is knowledge. And, back of that, power. Female friendships remain unthinkable because they are simply too dangerous. They threaten to unravel an entire world order of patriarchy, empire and submission.
— Tara McDowellExplore Barbara Cleveland | Thinking Business
A Goulburn Regional Art Gallery and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.
