Chantal Fraser: Shifting Ground
Chantal Fraser makes art with political and subversive messages, despite a level of shrouding and opacity.
An alluring aesthetic travels throughout her first major
survey with a cadence and tempo that welcomes its audience, all the while shifting the ground under our feet to transcend cultural conditioning and attitudes.
Image credit: Chantal Fraser, Fantômas Gold 2023, Welding helmet, adhesive, acrylic rhinestones, metallic glass shards, 30 x 26 x 21.5cm. Photo: Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artist
There is a musical tenor to Chantal Fraser’s first solo institutional exhibition, at Griffith University Art Museum in Meanjin/Brisbane. Here, curator Naomi Evans has expertly choreographed 20
years of Fraser’s supremely political practice, one that has generated less attention in Australia than globally.
The line Evans has taken through Fraser’s practice sees grouped photographs, sculpture, video and performance develop a finely tuned tempo that, like a musical synthesis, engages minds, bodies and emotions through both minimalist and boldly maximalist forms. The sound drifting from videos looping through each room resonates with the lively materiality of her objects, culminating in a major new video work developed for this exhibition, and from which it takes its title – The Ascended. In this recent major work Fraser asserts visibility, transcending “the conditioning with which we read the world” to welcome the broadest of communities.
“With my first major solo exhibition in a public institution, I feel honoured and excited to be able to show people so many components of my work and to see the threads that have been tied together through years of looking at subversion through the lens of feminist politics, as well as realising threads that I hadn’t identified before.”
Fraser was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1981, coming to Western Sydney when she was only four years old. The family moved again, this time to Meanjin/Brisbane, when she was 12. Her parents were from Sāmoa, and she remembers feeling “not entirely welcome in Australia, and sticking to familiar groups, connecting to church and rugby, ... Subscribe to read this article in full
