View ‘The Afternoon Mile’ below:
video by Kirsty Lee
‘The Afternoon Mile’
31 July - 9 August 2020
Alexandra Lawson Gallery presented a pop up exhibition at 196 Margaret Street showing work by Queensland artist David Usher. The exhibition titled ‘The Afternoon Mile’ was a preview for a larger exhibition in Brisbane later that year.
Usher creates abstract landscape paintings that evoke the landscape of Western Queensland, the Currumbin Valley in New South Wales, and Toowoomba City on a small and large scale. Usher’s work has been influenced by the drought of 2019, and an extended period in an urban environment while Usher was confined to town.
This has seen the paintings become an amalgamation of multiple places depicted through colour and imagery. Usher says, ‘The Afternoon Mile represents a wandering through these landscapes of the mind and the memory’. Usher continues, ‘I am seeking new ways of interpreting/revealing the landscape through paint... [the work] is entirely about a compulsion for seeing the environment anew and finding new ways of being immersed into the Australian landscape.’
These ideas of place and landscape also feature in Usher’s hand thrown ceramics which depict a hybrid landscape. These pieces embrace both the functional and beautiful.
Usher is the lecturer in ceramics at the University of Southern Queensland where he is undertaking his doctorate. He has received awards including the Churchie Painting Prize, as well as having work held in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, Artbank, Brisbane City Hall Gallery and Brisbane Potters Association. Usher said, ‘It’s fantastic to preview these works in Toowoomba before they head to Brisbane’.
Contact Alexandra Lawson Gallery for enquiries, info@alexandralawsongallery.com, 0418603695.