Fugitive Text by Peter Maloney
BOOK LAUNCH
3pm Saturday 15 October
Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University
Kingsley St, Acton ACT
Join Peter Maloney in the gallery forecourt to celebrate the publication of his work Fugitive Text
Refreshments will be provided
This new publication will be launched by artist Ruth Waller.
Fugitive Text draws together photographic diptychs and triptychs made since the mid-1990s in response to the artist’s experience of love, desire and loss through the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It incorporates photographs taken in-camera as well as images drawn from a variety of sources, including vintage photographs found in flea markets and images re-photographed from pornography and popular culture. The photographs – views of architectural and public spaces, flowers, nudes, images of sea and sky – are paired and, in most cases, overpainted with text –anecdotes, fragments drawn from memory, popular verse and queer culture.
The images draw on Peter Maloney’s experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (as an HIV-positive person who lost much of their social group during the 1980s and early 1990s) and on photography’s specific relationship to memory, time and place, and testimony. Combined with scraps of text, the images become memory fragments. The memories suggested by these works are those of someone remembering love and loss – friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS, and also the moments of desire, risk and sensation that in a way mark the queer experience of time and space.
The book, with its exposed spine and multiple fold out triptychs, was designed by Elliott Bryce Foulkes and is in itself an object of exceptional beauty.
The works are accompanied by texts by the prominent American author and cultural critic Lynne Tillman and writer and curator Shaune Lakin.
Peter Maloney works and lives in Canberra and has exhibited nationally and internationally for over five decades. He works across a wide range of media, from paintings and drawings to video and sound. In 2018 an extensive survey of his works on paper was held at the Drill Hall Gallery, ACT. His work can be found in significant private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of NSW.
Peter Maloney is represented by Utopia Arts, Sydney (https://www.utopiaartsydney.com.au)
Ruth Waller is a Canberra-based painter and former Head of Painting at ANU School of Art & Design.
Shaune Lakin (he/him) is Head Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He was the gallery's Senior Curator of Photography between 2014‒20, and before that Gallery Director, Monash Gallery of Art, in Narrm/Melbourne.
Venue
Drill Hall Gallery
Australian National University
Kingsley St, Acton ACT
T: (02) 6125 5832