Past Exhibition Raquel Ormella: I hope you get this

I hope you get this: Raquel Ormella is a selection of recent work by a nationally prominent artist who currently lives in Canberra and teaches at the ANU School of Art and Design. Ormella ranges across a wide variety of media: video, painting, installation, drawing, textile and zine production. Her experimental use of textiles and edgy manipulation of semiotics have won her sustained critical attention, and this is her first survey exhibition. It invites gallery visitors to reflect on issues of nationalism, political activism and environmental intervention.

I hope you get this ventures an ironic comment on the fragility and slippery undecidability of language and communication within a formalist decorum, such as prevails in the visual arts today. The message and the medium, the intention and reception of a work can find themselves not just at odds, but in a state of utter contradiction. Ormella’s work cannily accepts these uncomfortable uncertainties of communication with the proviso that an intelligent and well-intentioned viewer will almost certainly meet her work halfway.

The Drill Hall Gallery 2019 program of exhibitions has been generously supported by the ANU Visual Arts Foundation.