Mish Meijers
Welcome to the Hazards (detail) 2021
digital print.
Third Space Gallery + Digital
WELCOME TO THE HAZARDS
Mish Meijers
January 15th - March 12th
“The work tells you…” begins and ends my conversation with Tasmania based artist Mish Meijers. I am installing the second in a series of curated exhibitions, in the newly renovated Lt. Malop street gallery. Meijers’ show, Welcome to the Hazards, is being installed gradually over the month as artist and curator navigate installation by proxy.
Meijers’ work is always responsive to site, temporally and physically, from concept through to construction. Her installations are a mess of micronarratives that pop in and out of focus through catch phrases, shapes, colours and trends all underscored by the oft underestimated practice of paying attention. Meijers is always watching, listening and translating what she sees, hears and feels. Her practice dually explores the unfolding of events, and within this, an awareness of her activity and passivity. The images that she wilfully interrogates can’t negate what she is exposed to without consent. See all evil, hear all evil, speak all evil—and everything else as well—because there is joy in these works too. Welcome to the Hazards is a transfiguring of 2021; of 2 years of Covid, of 9 years of a liberal government, of 6 years of the dismantling of arts funding in Australia, of 21 years of collaboration, of the whole of a person’s life, of the slapdash-dash-slapstick “roadmap” to climate disaster.
So “normally” Meijers’ would be in the exhibition space for an intense installation period. I would watch her shifting objects deliberately around the gallery, finding new stories as she recollects and recreates a complex web of whims, responses, pains, and punchlines. I would sit idly by, watching and feeling; privileged to read what the artist is writing in objects around me. But the current climate has made travel difficult and movement unnecessarily risky. I climb and shift and try to look from someone else’s point of view. I’m installing a series of spotfires, panic rising, as I stack and sort and fluff tulle idly, increasingly aware of the world burning around me. I can’t help but smile, cursing the complication from the top rung of the ladder, as I realise that what I’ve just hung, just isn’t right… the work is telling me…
Welcome to the Hazards.
- Sarah Jones, curator
Mish Meijers
Welcome to the Hazards, 2021
digital lightbox print.
Dimensions variable
Mish Meijers is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice experiments in surface
tensions: how one material conforms or abrades against the matter of another. Whether in actuality, or within conceptual content, she distorts the inherent worth and significance of her objects with regard to popular culture, gender determination and functionality, in an alchemic and at times discordant sensibility.
Meijers uses installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, digital media, performance, and ceramics to translate and communicate her current concerns and interests.
Meijers divides her time between a distinct solo and an ongoing collaborative practice. The Collector Project now in its thirteenth year is collaboration with artist Tricky Walsh and is based on a fictional character Henri Papin.
Meijers has been a finalist in the following; Fishers Ghost art prize, Hobart Art Prize, The Substation Prize, The Paul Guest drawing prize, Tidal, The Churchie Prize and the Glover prize. She has been a recipient of numerous Australia Council and Arts Tasmania grants.
She has exhibited widely in Australia in various exhibition structures that include
artist run initiative galleries, public and commercial galleries. She has held
residencies and exhibited in New York, Indonesia and in Paris. She was awarded a Qantas Foundation Art Encouragement award and was commissioned by Gertrude Contemporary Gallery, Monash University Museum of Art and Detached Cultural Organisation to create new works for The Collector project.
Meijers work is held in public and private collections
