Works from TMAG Collection

This summer, TMAG is pleased to present photography and video works from its collection across its temporary exhibition galleries, highlighting three artists: Ricky Maynard, Anne Ferran and Joan Ross.

In Argyle Gallery 1, visitors will be able to see Ricky Maynard’s photography series Moonbird People (1985-88), and Portrait of a Distant Land (2005-07), which are a poignant record of his life, and that of his community, on the Bass Strait islands.

Maynard (born 1953) is from the Cape Portland / Ben Lomond people in lutruwita / Tasmania, and since the 1980s, his photographs have cut to the quick of the lives, histories and resilience of Australia’s First Peoples.

In Argyle Gallery 2 visitors can see Joan Ross’s video work I give you a mountain (2018), which touches on both the magnificence and tragedy of museums and is a reinvention of Sir Ashton Lever’s London museum, which opened in 1775.

For more than two decades, Ross (born 1961) has interrogated colonisation through the deceptively playful union of appropriation and animation, with I give you a mountain encapsulating this approach.

Finally, in Argyle Gallery 3, TMAG presents Anne Ferran’s photography series Lost to worlds (2008), which features images taken where the prison for women convicts once stood in Ross, Tasmania.

Ferran (born 1949) has spent decades photographing and representing the histories of convict women and children, exposing poignant tales of Australia's colonial past with poetic instinct, using fragmentary information from archives, museums and historic sites.