Boxcopy, Brisbane, 2016.
This exhibition derives its name from Table Talk, the weekly magazine published in Melbourne from the 1885 until 1939, which covered politics, arts and social gossip of the time. She presents a series of paintings that speak to the historical narrative that looms over the Heidelberg School artists of the 1890s and the nostalgic figure of the male painter in the landscape more generally. Collaging and contrasting newspaper cartoons, exhibition invitations and photographs of the Melbourne that these artists inhabited, Luscombe contemplates the lineage and myth-making surrounding painters such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin in relation to complex and problematic conceptions of the figure conducting en plein air painting. In this way, Luscombe questions the construction of cultural histories in Melbourne; and in Australian painting more broadly.
Table Talk, 2016, installation view, Boxcopy. Photo credit: Carl Warner.
Table Talk, 2016, installation view, Boxcopy. Photo credit: Carl Warner.
Table table, 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper, 272 X 300cm. Photo credit: Carl Warner
Table table (detail), 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper, 272 X 300cm. Photo: Carl Warner.
Table table (detail), 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper, 272 X 300cm. Photo: Carl Warner.
Table table (detail), 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper, 272 X 300cm. Photo: Carl Warner.
Seven careers in a lifetime, 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper and board, 270 X 147 X 35cm. Photo credit: Carl Warner.
Seven careers in a lifetime, 2016, acrylic on canvas, wallpaper and board, 270 X 147 X 35cm. Photo credit: Carl Warner.
The expanded landscape of artist and patron (after Alan McCulloch), 2016, acrylic on canvas, 204 X 178cm. Photo credit: Carl Warner.
The expanded landscape of artist and patron (after Alan McCulloch), 2016, acrylic on canvas, 204 X 178cm. Photo credit: Carl Warner.