Reference: from MCA website: Noel McKenna.
Born 1956, Brisbane, Queensland. Lives and works Sydney, New South Wales.
Noel McKenna works across an array of mediums including oil, watercolour and enamel paints, ceramics and lithographs. McKenna maintains an ongoing thematic aesthetic, looking at the everyday within his artworks. Focusing his subject matter on animals, people and objects, McKenna explores both their displacement, as well as their interconnected encounters, interactions, behaviours and relationships.
Throughout his career, McKenna has presented a number of solo exhibitions including Noel McKenna: Landscape – Mapped, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017); Australia Grotesque, Heiser Gallery, Brisbane (2017); Cats I Have Known, The Watermill Centre, New York, United States (2016); Concealing the Spot, Mother's Tankstation, Dublin (2015); A Walk from One Tree Hill to Half Moon Bay, Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand (2014); Polluting the acid – a selection of etchings and lithographs 1977–2013, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2013); Travel Notes 2, Heiser Gallery, Brisbane (2012); The Weekly Bus-Rail Ticket: Noel McKenna, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2008); Somewhere in the City, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane (2005).
McKenna has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including Scenes of our city, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane (2017); Close to Home, Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2016, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016); Art Basel Miami, mother’s tankstation, Miami Beach, United States (2015); Sublime Point: The landscape in painting, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Hazelhurst (2014); South of no North – Laurence Aberhart, William Eggleston, Noel McKenna, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013); Cicada Press: Collaboration and Connection, The Incinerator Art Space, Sydney (2011); Fully Booked, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne (2010); avoiding myth & message: Australian artists and the literary world, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2009).
McKenna’s work is held in numerous collections throughout Australia including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Parliament House, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; State Library of Queensland, Brisbane; University of Tasmania, Tasmania; University of Western Australia, Perth. McKenna’s work is also held in private collections in Australia and internationally.
From the MCA Collection Handbook
Noel McKenna’s Country Rail Network of Australia (2005) is, at first glance, likely to disconcert. We are unaccustomed to seeing the familiar contours of the country inscribed with the entirety of its train tracks; this is not for large paintings in contemporary art museums but rather the stuff of railway brochures where, if we see any track lines at all, they are circumscribed by state or territory borders. The deceptive ordinariness of this subject, however, is combined with a considered approach to the medium of painting, making Country Rail Network of Australia an important work in McKenna’s oeuvre.
Despite his ‘homely’ hand, McKenna’s work is far from naïve; on the contrary, his is a highly considered practice. Brisbane-born and educated, McKenna is based in Sydney where he is a prodigious maker of prints, artist’s books, ceramics, paintings and sculpture that often humorously depict aspects of everyday life. In 2005 his long-term friend, the New Zealand poet Gregory O’Brien, revealed that “museum-quality work” is “an arch term in McKenna’s lexicon”.1 And, indeed, McKenna has made a very successful career out of genres and mediums that are low in the pecking order of the canonical hierarchy. He rarely makes ‘museum-scale’ works; when he makes what for him is a large work, such as Country Rail Network of Australia, we see his take on the grand genre of the subject or history painting.
Country Rail Network of Australia is from McKenna’s ongoing series of map paintings that began in 2004 with Race Tracks of Australia followed by bp fuel outlets of Australia (2005), Australian freshwater fish (2005) and Lighthouses of Australia (2006). The etching The Baggy Green (2007) differs from the other maps in that instead of location-related information the Australian continent is inscribed with a list of 395 men who played Australian Test Cricket. McKenna has described these works as a “straightforward way of talking about the landscape”. For him, Country Rail Network of Australia also has “abstract qualities … it shows how the country has been settled and the interests of the people”.2
On a personal level, Country Rail Network of Australia reflects McKenna’s affection for train travel. He doesn’t drive, has traversed much of Australia by train and his habitual negotiation of Sydney by public transport has been the subject of entire exhibitions.3 Stylistically, the maps are a particular component of his oeuvre. As he explains: “[they] are almost documentary paintings – they require a lot of research. They are slightly different from my other work in that I don’t make as many aesthetic decisions … [With maps] you have to put the name of the place where it is.”4
Visually, Country Rail Network of Australia is so pared back as to be almost stark, its bluntness evading easy interpretation. But we can be sure of one thing: for Noel McKenna, it depicts important information.
Anne Loxley
Anne Loxley is Senior Curator, C3West at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.
1 Gregory O’Brien, ‘Sheltered life – Noel McKenna’, in Noel McKenna: Sheltered Life, exhibition catalogue, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, 2005, p 8.
2 See Noel McKenna, ‘Lobby – Viocorp’, http://webcast.viostream.com/Player/Default.aspx?viocast=6200&auth=fa6d8372-4335-4832-980d-2228bcef8da2&enableCache=True (accessed February 2016).
3 For example, The Weekly Bus-Rail Ticket: The Return Journey, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney and The Weekly Bus-Rail Ticket: Noel McKenna, National Art School Gallery, Sydney, both 2008.
4 McKenna, op. cit.
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