Affording Truth
Aug 1, 2026 to Oct 18, 2026 | Main Gallery
Image: Raquel Ormella, Wealth for Toil #6, 2026 acrylic paint, cotton, metallic and acrylic thread on hessian, 280 x 250cm. Photo Dorian Photographic
About
Affording Truth explores how we perceive and navigate truth in an era of global uncertainty, using the framework of affordances - the qualities of objects or environments that suggest or enable actions and interactions. Perceived, false or hidden, affordances are everywhere and key to how humans navigate the world.
Fuelled by the rapid integration of digital networked systems and hardware, social media, algorithms and artificial intelligence, truth has become relative, contested and ambiguous. Facts once deemed indisputable are now questioned and open to manipulation in social, political and digital worlds through the creation and widespread distribution of unfiltered content, artifice, fake news, disinformation and confected realities.
The exhibition presents new and existing work by artists who interrogate the increasingly muddy space of truth including Alison Alder, Robert Andrew, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Lauren Dunn, Honor Freeman, Tyza Hart, Daniel McKewen, Juanita McLauchlan, Raquel Ormella, Baden Pailthorpe, Ryan Presley, Alex Seton, Scotty So and Esther Stewart. Their use of affordances are both nuanced and straightforward, perceivable and obscure, provoking thought, exposing hidden systems or challenging social assumptions.
Artists in this exhibition unpack themes ranging from explorations of identity and nationalism to critiques of technology, consumerism and colonisation. Through materiality, narrative or digital manipulation, the fragile, shifting nature of truth is interrogated. Affording Truth speaks to the veracity that art shapes our understanding of a world in which only uncertainty is certain.
Affording Truth is a collaborative curatorial project between Wangaratta Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and City of Moreton Bay Galleries curated by Rachel Arndt, Dr Lee-Anne Hall and Hannah Williamson. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
