Although it seems like an April Fools’ joke, the University of Queensland received a real, rather unusual delivery recently, while preparing for a unique art show at the UQ Art Museum. An entire airplane arrived at UQ, piece by piece, to feature in the first Australian survey exhibition of collaborative artists, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro.
Courtesy of UQ, artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro as well as Nature Morte, Berlin and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney and © the artists
UQ said a Cessna 172 airplane arrived in 70 cut-up metal sections, sent by airmail of course, at UQ Art Museum, through Australia Post, as one of the artworks for the exhibition Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, which opens this Friday, April 5.
UQ Art Museum director Dr. Campbell Gray, said for the artwork Par Avion (2011), the Cessna parts will be re-arranged into the shape of the original plane across the gallery, its broken and reassembled parts evocative of a plane crash. “The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, developed the exhibition Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, and the UQ Art Museum is the only gallery in Australia to which it will travel,” Gray told the university.
The artists lead a nomadic lifestyle, travelling and undertaking residencies in numerous countries, and a key theme in the artists’ work is the concept of home’, the university reported. Through their work, Healy and Cordeiro playfully reinvent prefabricated structures and transform everyday objects into extraordinary sculptures and installations.
The University of Queensland said several of the works on display have involved the artists acquiring, dismantling and reassembling large-scale domestic dwellings – an entire suburban house in the Cordial Home Project (2003), a well-loved caravan in Wohnwagen (2006–07), and an old Queensland farm house in Not Under My Roof (2008) – the latter exhibited in Contemporary Australia: Optimism at QAGOMA in 2008–09.
In Future Remnant (2011), a life-sized replica of a Monolophosaurus dinosaur skeleton is harnessed by cable ties to a stack of partially assembled IKEA furnishings, as if tied to a sedimentary layer of materialism, UQ reports.
But the University of Queensland is not just hosting the incredible exhibition – it also helped to hang it. It showcases 22 of the artists’ most significant works from the past eight years, drawing on works from the University of Queensland Art Collection, MCA Collection and private loans.
The exhibition is open daily at UQ Art Museum (University Drive, St Lucia Campus) from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until July 28, 2013, and is accompanied by an 80-page publication, called Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro.
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Find out more about the University of Queensland’s extensive arts programming! Look further into UQ itself and apply through OzTREKK.
