Narelle Jubelin

Foreign Affairs (The Gibbes Art Gallery Miniature Portrait Collection), 1990-91

petitpoint and faux frames with the centre (ivory) frame housing The Chicago Foreign Order Medal
9 parts, 16 x 13.5 cm approx. each
signed, dated and inscribed with title ‘Narelle Jubelin/1991/Foreign Affairs’ (on the reverse of each)

View extended notes

Provenance
Mori Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited
Foreign Affairs, for Places with a Past: New Site Specific Art in Charleston, curated by Mary Jane Jacobite, Customs House for the Spoleto Festival, Charleston, South Carolina, United States of America, 24 May – August 4 1991
The Subversive stitch, Mori Gallery, Sydney, 1992, cat. no. 17:1
The
Subversive stitch, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 29
August – 28 September 1991

Literature
Mary Jane Jacob, Places with a past - new site-specific art
at Charleston's Spoleto Festival, Rizzoli, New York, 1991
‘Subtle Tension in the work of Narelle Jubelin’, Art and Australia, Winter 1992, pp. 464-5
Ann Stephens & Luke Parker, Narelle Jubelin: Vision in Motion, The University of Sydney, Sydney, 2012, illus. p.75
Natalie King, The Subversive Stitch, Monash University
Gallery, 1991 


“Narelle Jubelin is a commodities trader, buying low, selling high, tracking objects as they and their ideological underpinnings traverse the globe. In 1991 Mary Jane Jacob curated a series of city-wide installations for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Jubelin chose the US Customs House as the site for her ongoing inquiry into colonialism and trade. The customs house, built just before and after the Civil War, is located at the historical crux of slavery and as the seat of tensions between Federal and States' Rights, between the selling of commodities and the tariffs and taxes applied to their import and exchange. Installed in the building's two-storey atrium or Business Room, Foreign Affairs introduced artifacts and artworks into the closed confines of government bureaucracy, making for an accounting of a rather different kind: the tallying of museum and non-museum, public and private, 'high' and 'low' artifacts, presaging Fred Wilson's rather more well-known museological intervention, Mining the Museum (Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland, 1992). (Margaret Morgan, Reg & Joy Grundy Collection, Bonhams, http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21362/lot/78/?category=list&length=50&page=2)

“In the installation, called Foreign Affairs the artist pinpointed actual and metaphoric similarities and differences between Australia and Charleston, united at they are in their colonial roots. This complex show – composed of four sets of miniatures placed in four corners of the mezzanine level of the Customs House – referenced particular aspects of Charleston’s history, and charted the relationship of that history to aspects of internationalism. The four sets of petit points included renditions of ivory portrait miniatures and miniature-like samplers of a Guggenheim catalogue list. The other two sets include renditions of slave tags and ironwork.’ (Diane Losche, ‘Subtle Tension in the Work of Narelle Jubelin’, Art and Australia, Winter 1992, Vol. 29, No. 4, p. 465)