Mervyn Moriarty Landscape Award Winner Solo Exhibition Opening

Venue: Judith Wright Arts Centre

Date: 12 June

Time: 5:30 – 8pm

As part of her prize as winner of The Mervyn Moriarty Landscape Award, Victoria Reichelt will show a series of work at the Judith Wright Art Centre in a two-week exhibition.

Across Victoria Reichelt’s practice there is a constant theme of movement and stillness – the perpetual movement of time and the stillness of capturing a moment of it in paint. Reichelt’s archiving of the ephemeral, intangible, and disposable, documents this constant movement. In the Focus series it is that of elevating a moment to an artefact. Reminiscent of saving clippings, or scrapbooking, Reichelt preserves children’s drawings. Meticulously rendering discarded magazines of yore that shout of issues still relevant now, capture a past and present, as well as the move beyond these outdated modes of news dissemination.

Reichelt’s works of impressive detail and precision explore the complexities of this shift from analogue to digital, clinging to a tangibility of objects, especially those that are fleeting. The purposeful use of our oldest method of documentation is in direct opposition to the degradation of detail, skill and slow craft brought about by the crashing speed of image production online. Her conscious slow rendering mourns what is almost already obsolete.

Victoria Reichelt’s winning artwork of the Mervyn Moriarty Landscape Prize is Focus 4 (2024). This work is currently on tour in Resolution, the QRAA touring exhibition, on show now in Moranbah.

The Mervyn Moriarty Landscape Award is a category of the Queensland Regional Art Awards (QRAA) which honours Flying Art’s legendary founder, Mervyn Moriarty OAM. Merv used prize money from an art award to learn how to fly. In 1971 he took his first flight, a 6,000 km round journey, setting up the ‘art school’ that is now Flying Arts. Between 1971 – 1983, he flew to 26 centres, four times a year, an extraordinary 400,000 km.

Image: Courtesy of the Artist