TextaQueen: Rise and Fall

5 - 29 Mar 2016

THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery is excited to be exhibiting TextaQueen’s first solo show in Melbourne.

Rise and Fall meditates on TextaQueen’s identity as an Australian born Indian often living and creating on others’ ancestral lands. These new works meld landscapes the artist witnessed with elements associated with their cultural heritage. Often featuring TextaQueen in or as part of the hybrid landscape, these are allegorical meditations on how cultural identity informs experiences of place, the artist’s neo-colonial position on Indigenous lands and other dimensions of South Asian diasporic identity. These works were created during recent residencies at The League Residency, Vytlacil, Upstate New York on Tappan land; an Asialink residency in Varanasi, India; and on Wurundjeri land at Laughing Waters, Eltham.

TextaQueen has won acclaim for her works using fibre-tip markers, a notoriously unforgiving medium. She has exhibited widely including at Museum of Contemporary Art; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; Australian Centre for Moving Image, the Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA; and internationally in Amsterdam, Belgium and across North America including a mural commission for ‘Taking it to the Streets’ at de Young Museum, San Francisco.

TextaQueen’s work is held in institutional collections including Art Gallery of Western Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Monash University Museum of Art, Artbank and University of Queensland.