Join us for this accessible and generative conversation about contemporary art and psychoanalysis, grounded in the development of Natalya Hughes exhibition The Interior. Natalya Hughes will be joined by clinical psychologist Dr Andrew Geeves and author and academic Professor Susan Best to talk about what psychoanalysis is and how it is useful in a contemporary context.
The Interior evokes an exaggerated consultation room, playfully furnished for psychoanalysis. The forms and decorative surfaces of the works in this installation reference the consultation room and practices of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Given the abundance of imagery which The Interior draws from Freud’s work, we will ponder the question, how can art be informed by psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis informed by art?
COVID-19 Advice
The IMA strongly encourages mask-wearing onsite in the galleries and for events to keep our community safe. If you are displaying symptoms of COVID-19 or are feeling unwell, please stay home.
Accessibility
We are committed to making the IMA accessible to people of all abilities, their families, and carers, as well as visitors of different ages and different backgrounds.
The gallery entrance is on the ground floor of the Judith Wright Arts Centre, on Berwick Street. There is wheelchair access and an accessible toilet with baby changing facilities also located on the ground floor, and we welcome guide and support dogs.
To find out more, contact us at ima@ima.org.au, call (07) 3252 5750, or ask our friendly staff on-site. You can also read our access information for visitors here: Word Doc or PDF.
-
Natalya Hughes’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects. Using the life and work of major twentieth-century male artists Willem de Kooning and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well archival case studies of Sigmund Freud, Hughes seeks to examine society’s ‘problems’ with women and the fraught associations that have ultimately determined them.
Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory and Deputy Director (Research) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (IB Tauris, 2011) and Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing and Contemporary Art Photography (Bloomsbury, 2016) both books won the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book Her most recent book is It’s not personal: Post 60s body art and performance (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Dr Andrew Geeves is a clinical psychologist who hovers somewhere between Sydney and New York City. He is currently based on the Gold Coast, with a private practice in Burleigh Heads, and is a candidate in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University. He draws on an integrative, flexible, and psychoanalytic approach to therapy that aims to honour the uniqueness of individual experience. His clinical areas of interest include emotion, identity, trauma, relationships, personality, sex, gender and sexuality, change, loss, and trust. Andrew also co-hosts a podcast on relational psychoanalytic supervision made in collaboration with Professor Gill Straker and Rachael Burton called Three Associating.
Natalya Hughes, 'The Interior', work in progress, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, and Milani Gallery
