MAY 28, 2016 - JULY 9, 2016
For many decades, poetry and music have played a central role in the practice of Ian Friend. Composers Martin Friedel and Cornelius Cardew along with English poet Jeremy Prynne have been the artist’s muse at one time or another. Friend’s latest body of work, City Ghosts, relates to a suite of poems by Queensland indigenous poet Sam Wagan Watson titled Smoke Encrypted Whispers. The poems deal largely with memories of growing up in Brisbane and the ghosts of a sense of place that was transformed during the Bjelke Peterson era. Friend’s artwork is an allusive response, not only triggered by the text but also by the experience of living in Brisbane for two decades “witnessing ongoing transformations that result in the manifestation of more ghosts, echoes of a past that now only exist in memory and imagination.”