Land & Title

The collection of the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) consists of almost 3000 objects and works of art. It is a collection of diversity and strength, and like any sustained collection, it wears its history proudly. The careful examination of any such collection is an act of cultural archaeology that variously reveals through-lines of focus, moments of great achievement or generosity, curiosities, spasms of eccentricity, maligned histories, and reasons for deserved civic, personal or institutional pride. The MAMA Collection is no different in this regard.

This spectrum of inquiry and endeavour is no easy thing to map. As such, the hang of the MAMA art collection, under the banner of Land & Title, did not attempt a comprehensive survey. Rather, it seeked moments of connection between art works that bridged divides of time, style, medium and origin.

Land & Title was an exclusively Australian exhibition, and took its title from Albury’s Land and Title Building, which was renovated to form part of the MAMA redevelopment.

The works of the nineteen artists presented in Land and Title collectively offered a story of the complexity, difference and strength of recent Australian art practice, and the relationship between the art and the environment in which it was made.

Artworks that related directly to artist’s experience of the local area are included, with Russell Drysdale’s Convoy on a road near Albury, and Mary Jane Griggs' Arboreta series, featured prominently. These sat within an exchange between artworks that consider the complex history of Australia more broadly.

Gordon Bennett’s print works Poem and Penetration explicitly addressed the violent colonisation of this land by British forces, Yorta Yorta artist Uncle Phil Murray’s collection of spears signposts displayed Aboriginal resilience whilst celebrated traditional practices of object making, whilst Gloria Petyarre’s Leaves provided a modest, yet beautiful example of the artist’s defining painterly motif, elongated daubs of paint that suggest the dynamism of nature and speak to practices of bush medicine.

Also included were works by Tom Roberts, Fred Williams and Ian Fairweather, three male artists who, although separated in time and celebrated in their own unique ways, present markers of colonial histories of Australia that informed an understanding of the ongoing centrality of land to Australian cultural sensibilities.

These works of art provided a frame upon which ideas that related more closely to subjective inspection, material exploration and the nature of narrative and storytelling can be supported. Artists in this section of Land & Title included Bea Maddock, Aida Tomescu and Mike Parr, three artists who have greatly informed recent histories of Australian printmaking.

Photographers Olive Cotton, Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson and Justine Varga, as well as Asher Bilu and Gunter Christmann, John Coburn and Jimmy Njiminjuma presented a brief history of contemporary photography and .