'Flowah Powah: Alice Lang' floor talk
Join QUT Galleries and Museums Engagement Officer, Renae Belton on a tour of Troy-Anthony Baylis' exhibition, I wanna be adorned and Alice Lang's exhibition Flowah Powah at QUT Art Museum.
Alice Lang: Flowah Powah borrows from a vibrant counterculture aesthetic that rose out of LA in the 1960s, while playing on a uniquely Australian vernacular, through goading and sometimes humorous painting, text and sculpture. Lang taps into the current political and cultural climate to deliver a high impact visual journey full of kitsch, vulgarism and the absurd, challenging the audience to consider biases and assumptions surrounding heteronormativity, gender roles and body politics in her first major institutional show.
Lang’s use of materials traditionally associated with craft, such as puffy paint and marbled paper, boldly addresses the historical devaluation of feminised labour and materials. This reclamation is echoed in the provocative language repeated throughout the exhibition, the jarring scale and decontextualisation competing with psychedelia for the viewer’s attention. The politically charged work explores how capitalism and the patriarchy combine to determine that a woman’s “value” resides in their body by seeking to control female bodily autonomy through objectification and the restriction of reproductive rights.
Lang is QUT Alumni, graduating in 2004, and is now based in LA. Her solo exhibition Flowah Powah coincides with fellow alumni Troy-Anthony Baylis’ solo exhibition I wanna be adorned.
Image credit: Alice Lang. Flowah Powah (detail) 2019, marbled paper and acrylic on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
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For any queries, contact QUT Art Museum on +61 7 3138 1384 or artmuseum@qut.edu.au.