Mona Ryder: RED ROAR
4 December 2027 - 27 February 2028
Gallery 1 | Free
Mona Ryder: RED ROAR celebrates 80 years of life and more than five decades of an extraordinary artistic practice. Rather than a conventional retrospective, RED ROAR brings works from across Ryder’s life together as a single, large-scale installation of altar-like gatherings within a vast space. The works become offerings, memories, relics, personal histories and acts of devotion. Ryder’s commonplace and domestic materials are transformed into the totemic, while recurring objects and forms become an evolving visual language.
RED ROAR is visceral, theatrical, tender, unruly and fiercely independent. It is an exhibition about a life lived through art and an invitation to experience that life as one extraordinary work.
Curated by Cassandra Lehman
About Mona Ryder
Mona Ryder is a significant Queensland artist whose practice has evolved across more than five decades. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, printmaking, textiles, drawing and mixed media, Ryder has developed a distinctive visual language from everyday objects, domestic materials and the accumulated fragments of lived experience. Her practice brings the personal into dialogue with the collective, transforming domestic objects and fragments of everyday life into vessels for memory, emotion and social commentary.
Mona Ryder’s enduring contribution to Australian contemporary art lies in her ability to make the familiar strange and the ordinary significant. Through objects, spaces and memories, she creates work that is intimate, theatrical, unsettling, humorous and profoundly human.
About Cassandra Lehman
Cassandra Lehman is an Australian curator, arts professional and artist with more than two decades of experience across the contemporary arts sector. Based in Brisbane, her career encompasses curatorial and leadership roles in public and independent galleries, arts organisations, higher education and local government, as well as independent curatorial projects, writing, artist representation and art consultancy.
Images:
1. Mona Ryder. Photo: Cassandra Lehman
2. Cassandra Lehman. Photo: Louis Lim