Second Sight

Witchcraft, Ritual, Power

University of Queensland Art Museum

Brisbane

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While at Australia’s helm, Julia Gillard experienced a tyranny of chauvinistic abuse. The words ‘ditch the witch’ were scrawled over placards and similar sentiments were echoed by choruses of protesters looking for Gillard to drop promises of a Carbon Tax. Newspaper cartoons followed suit, depicting the Prime Minister with a long, bulbous nose, straw-like hair and tied to a stake waiting to go up in flames. Comparisons drawn between women in power and witches are nothing new, with the trope’s long history as a derogatory term used to pull women from leadership and relegate them to positions of powerlessness. The University of Queensland Art Museum’s Second Sight: Witchcraft, Ritual, Power seeks to undo and reconsider the role of witches and their magic in both historical and contemporary times.

The witch hunt that followed Gillard’s leadership rarely critiqued her politics but instead focussed on her hair, her nose and her waistline. The same imagery that followed Gillard throughout her reign is historically seeded in the exhibition in Northern Renaissance etchings by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, as well as a woodblock print by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. In each print, women are reduced to their physical form. In Dürer's and Baldung Grien’s work emphasis is placed on their grotesque features. In the case of Castiglione, the temptress Circe’s mystical beauty is wielded over men, whom she transforms into wild beasts.

Alongside the historic prints are works by Judith Wright, Mikala Dwyer, Emily Hunt, and collaborative works by Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley. But the most spellbinding works are by Naomi Blacklock, Eric Bridgeman and Clare Milledge (and her collaborators), who all consider forms of witchcraft in present times while acknowledging its

Naomi Blacklock, Aflame, A Singing Sun, 2019. Installation view and performance detail. Gong, gong stand, acrylic paint, stainless steel, cotton, charcoal, contact microphones, speakers, mixer. Performance commissioned for Second Sight opening, UQ Art Museum, 1 March 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph Carl Warner.

Eric Bridgeman, Fire on Dorothy Island, 2018. Type-C print on cotton rag, acrylic, 115x95cm. Edition of 5. Installation views, Second Sight, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane. Courtesy the artist. Photographs Carl Warner.