Photo: Doug Spowart
At a general meeting last week, and on the eve of the Queensland Festival of Photography’s inaugural conference, the Queensland Centre of Photography (QCP) unanimously agreed to close its Brisbane venue with the intention to open a new space in Los Angeles.
QCP was heavily hit last October when the State Government withdrew its core Triennual funding with no warning. The QCP will officially close its doors as of today, 28 April, after a decade of exhibitions and programs.
The non-profit organisation, which had moved into its South Bank venue in 2009 with a ten-year lease, became immediately unteniable, with QCP Director Maurice Ortega forced to start negotiations on breaking its lease and forfeiting its bond. Ortega said that QCP had made the move from its former Bulimba warehouse ‘because the government made a strategic commitment.’
In a bold – and some could argue visionary – move, Ortega is turning to Los Angeles for its future, and to reap the benefit of an eight-year commitment of presenting Australian photographers as Photo LA art fair, building a collector base and international profile for Australian photo and media artists.
Ortega told ArtsHub, ‘The QCP wasn’t just created to provide a public benefit; we were created to provide sustainability to the artist as well, and so once we don’t have that public money, we are concentrating completely on what we do to support those artists.’
He continued, ‘If you think of the arts industry and you compare imports to exports it is totally unsustainable. What that means is a lot of Australian artist don’t get a lot of exposure internationally and they don’t have access or leverage into those markets.
What the QCP did as an institution was to create leverage in a market that had a high level of recognition and a lot of prestige and we chose LA because it was the closest, and it was focusing on the Asia Pacific. A lot of the media institutions – the Getty, LACMA – are looking at the Pacific Rim so we decided to go there and start to open not only a market but an educational process with these institutions.’
‘Now, after eight years, and particular with the recession when we were the only international gallery that maintained a presence in LA, that means now that we are coming out of the recession in America we are placed as one of the top international galleries in LA and we have a lot of networks,’ said Ortega.
The plan agreed by the QCP board was to initiate an aggressive fundraising campaign that will include the sale of the QCP collection at the most extreme edge, and a limited edition portfolio of photographs also announced this week as a softer approach. The bottom line is the fire sale and relocation is about economic rationalisation and sustainability.
Ortega told ArtsHub, ‘If you look at the rental value of the property in LA it is about half of what is in Brisbane. We would be paying less in Beverly Hills than we would be in Brisbane. So in terms of sustainability you have lower costs, you have much larger market.’
Ortega presents an interesting case for the future. He said, ‘These days, if an artist does not have a global practice it is just not going to happen. This, strategically, is really problematic because right now the art market is globalizing and Australia imports an amount of art that is insane in relation to the export levels. Most of the export resources are focused on individual artist going overseas, and now the art fair fund provides some commercial galleries, but commercial galleries find it difficult to access the market, and part of the reason is because we don’t have major institutions the state galleries exporting – they have fabulous shows of Australian work but they don’t export it.’
Ortega added, ‘The institutions that import art weren’t charged [by the funding cuts] and yet people like ourselves, that are not only exporting but developing Australian talent, were decimated and it has really damaged the ecology of Brisbane.’
Key to this move is the QCP’s partnership with the LA-based company Curatorial Assistance, which is a major company that tours large exhibitions across the United States founded by the Inaugural director of the Australian Centre of Photography, Graham Howe.
QCP is in discussion with Curatorial Assistance over a large permanent exhibition venue that Ortega says will ‘not only support not only photography, but other media’.
And the timeline?
Ortega told ArtsHub it will depend ‘on the community support for the project, it depends on the position of the Australia Council – it depends on a lot of things. It is such a unique project that it needs a national platform to support it. It is a national story. It emerged from Brisbane just because we were one of the first people to be involved in export and had a very clear agenda but it is really a national venture.’
A statement from Peter Annand, Chair of QCP, said that the organisation ‘will maintain an active presence in Queensland and will continue its publication, education and other programs as funding permits.’
Ortega added, ‘We hope in the future, when the environment is propitious, to reopen a venue in Brisbane. New partnerships and programs will emerge as we engage in this new project and we will continue to work with government, sponsors and artists to support the development of Australian art.’
In recent weeks, QCP has convened the fifth biennial Queensland Festival of Photography (QFP5) with the support of fifty-five venues throughout the state.
The Festival included a conference last week with the loose theme Photography and Fictions, attended by international, interstate and Queensland curators, collectors, and artists. Keynote speakers were US photomedia collaborative Kahn/Selesnick and American artist James Casebere.
ArtsHub attended the conference as a guest of QCP and will be following with a piece on its outcomes at this unique moment in the organisation’s history.
