Threaded Perspectives
Monday 15 April – Saturday 20 July
Joondalup Library
Threaded Perspectives is a temporary art exhibition being held at Joondalup Library. The event is part of a series of never-before-seen exhibitions that feature works from the City of Joondalup Art Collection, commemorating Joondalup’s 25-year anniversary as a local government. This special milestone program celebrates the diversity of the City’s Art Collection, showcasing its unique identity and make-up of Western Australian artists, and providing an insight into the immeasurable cultural value it holds.
Image credit: William Leggett, Module Exo 3 (A Knowledge of Gravity), 2022. City of Joondalup Art Collection.
About the exhibition
Within the span of 25 years, three major themes – or threads – have emerged within the City of Joondalup Art Collection. These are ‘suburbia and the Northern Corridor’, ‘materiality and form’, and ‘interpretations of landscape’. For the first time, Threaded Perspectives brings together a selection of highlights from the collection, offering a unique insight and exploration of these themes.
Reflecting on the history and geography of the Joondalup region, it is evident to see how these themes have developed prominently within the collection. Rapid and expansive suburban growth since 1998 has had significant impact on artists that engage with Joondalup and similar high growth areas within the Perth metropolitan region. These artists are keen observers of everyday experiences of suburbia, often drawing upon local suburban aesthetics or playful moments they stumble upon.
Similarly, artists have often been intrigued with the City’s breadth of natural environments, with the region boasting landscapes as diverse as wetlands, coastline, and bushland. Some artists dive deep into a specific place and their relation to it, while other artists channel their ongoing engagement with landscape and its presence into works that speak more broadly about their feeling and connection to place.
Artworks that engage with ideas of materiality and form have risen steadily over the Collection’s lifespan, with most acquired through the City’s annual Invitation Art Prize and possibly symptomatic of a broader trend among Western Australian contemporary artists. Central to these works is a sharp awareness of the artists’ chosen media’s materiality and how it can be manipulated, stretched, pulled, or corrupted to create an artwork. These works are often characterised by a sense of material play, unexpected moments, and questions of “how did they do that?”.
A central role of the artist is to observe and consume the world around them, filter it through their own experiences and generate an artistic outcome that offers a compelling interpretation of their interests. Threaded Perspectives highlights the different approaches artists take from similar departure points, offering reflections on varied experiences and providing viewers a chance to look at the world through different lenses, enrichening their own perception of suburbia, landscape, and materiality.
Image credit: Ron Nyisztor, Large Composition with Brick Fragment, 2010. City of Joondalup Art Collection.
About the City of Joondalup Art Collection
The City’s Art Collection was formed with the inception of the City in 1998, with Joondalup inheriting the contemporary artworks from the City of Wanneroo’s Art Collection. With a primary focus on the work of Western Australian contemporary artists, the Collection includes sculpture, drawings, paintings, print works, textiles, ceramics, glass work, video, photography, and installation. Along with standard collecting avenues, acquisitions are actively informed through the City’s annual exhibitions, including the $25,000 Invitation Art Prize, as well as a biennial $20,000 Visual Arts Commission. The Art Collection today is comprised of over 290 artworks and worth over $1.2million.
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