Want an outlet?
#dearministerforwomen is an online art activist forum open to anyone to voice their dissatisfaction with the current political and social climate.
We would love people to stage their own form of protest, document and hashtag #dearministerforwomen it will become a snapshot of how the country is feeling about Abbott and his actions.
The first part of the project was launched with an exhibition at Cross Arts by artists Mish Meijers and Tricky Walsh.
This exhibition ended Saturday 18 July 2015.
Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers are subversives. While both maintain significant individual art practices, they have been collaborationists for over ten years making work that challenges and ultimately explodes the taxonomies of masculinist hetero-normativity.
Dear Minister for Women is their latest collaborative installation. Through their single, collegiate and collaborative practices they make work that undermines the taxonomies of masculinist hetero-normative orthodoxies.
Alongside the exhibition, Walsh and Meijers hope that an online ephemeral archive will emerge as visitors share their anger and disbelief with the current political climate through the hashtag #DearMinisterforWomen. They see this tool as continuing the process of appropriation and re-imagining that our time demands.
Based in Hobart and regarded as having installation practices, they have responded to curator Craig Judd’s challenge to make an explicitly political show. In Dear Minister for Women, Walsh and Meijers range across their materials – video, linocut, clay, photography and textiles – to invoke the heroines of their lives and imaginations. The Wicked Witch of the West, nineties icon Riot Girl, Louise Bourgeois, Pussy Riot and their video collaborators all have a part in their evolving feminist and queer genealogies. Pastel and fluoro, high and low, jostle in interwoven scenarios that use the unofficial, the vernacular and the hand-made as connectors between protest and the carnivalesque.
Walsh and Meijers state: We are constructing a visual archive from recent current affairs and forgotten historical facts in an attempt to make history present and accountable.
Dear Minister for Women is using the concept of the hashtag as a collective curatorial archiving tool and appropriating internet memes for their critical immediacy and their accessibility, while reimagining them using traditional art-forms (drawing, painting, comics, ‘zines, banner-making, textiles) in this physical space.
Links to Mish Meijers and Tricky Walsh’s Dear Minister for Women on vimeo
https://vimeo.com/130865855 – War on Hair – wow
https://vimeo.com/131753191 - caterpillars
https://vimeo.com/131754239 – angry ladies