Platform

GALLERY 3A

Miguel Aquilizan is intuitive in his inquiry, improvisational in his approach, and inventive in his use of diverse and novel materials. His sculptures have a magical quality, with one foot in totemism and animism, another in science fiction and the posthuman.

Aquilizan incorporates anything and everything: expanding foam and fake foliage, fibreglass and furniture, the raw and the cooked. He arranges and assembles, constructs and deconstructs. In one work, he hybridises two reproduction human skeletons, mocking the idealism of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

Aquilizan relates his love of found materials back to the Philippines, where he was born. There, things are never thrown away, but endlessly repurposed and reanimated.

He says, ‘I like the idea of obscuring and mutating what is familiar, making everything alien.’

GALLERY 4

Mia Boe is a painter of Butchulla and Burmese ancestry whose work responds to the colonisation and mistreatment of people and culture in K’gari and Burma/Myanmar. Her paintings feature elongated figures representing ancestral spirits, historical figures, and family members, and nod to iconic settler Australian painters Sydney Nolan and Russell Drysdale.

In recent work, Boe has drawn on writings by seminal Murri poet, activist, and artist Uncle Lionel Fogarty. Her six-panel painting Was Satellite Progressive? was inspired by his poem ‘Connoisseur’, which bemoans the ways academics and intellectuals, historians and social scientists, have presumed to classify Indigenous people and their experience. Their ‘philosophy, theory, and encyclopedia’ are ‘unsophisticated to our Murri Imagined realistic minds’, it explains.

Boe’s painting suggests both a continuous outback landscape and a sequence of discrete frames, with night falling from left to right. Painting on the wall behind connects the horizons in the panels, extrapolating them around the room.

Allegorical figures appear throughout. Dead trees and stars, graves and lines on the landscape, echo their lanky forms. Some figures exemplify the colonial mindset: one stares at the land through a magnifying glass; another, gestures to a globe with one hand and picks at an exposed brain with the other. Other figures reconcile with each other and with Country, recalling Fogarty’s line ‘we are spirits in levity’.

GALLERY 3B

Sarah Poulgrain has been described as a dedicated, yet self-effacing figure in Meanjin/Brisbane’s artist-run initiative (ARI) community. A frequent collaborator with others—and facilitator for others—their work is based in learning and sharing skills, from welding to weaving.

Poulgrain lives and works in a former bike-wrecker’s workshop in Woolloongabba, which they renovated with friends. It is also home to Wreckers Artspace, an ARI Poulgrain co-founded.

Having experienced a flood and faced with the prospect of losing their home to gentrification, Poulgrain teamed up with fellow travellers to design and build a DIY ark, called Dreamboat. Like their current home, it is half residence, half gallery. It will soon be launched on Brisbane River.

In Platform, Poulgrain presents the gallery half, with its first show: works by Alrey Batol, Charlie Hillhouse, and Leen Rieth. In the IMA, it’s a show within a show, a platform within a platform, an alternative within an alternative.