Author Archives: Artist Profile
Cassandra Bird
The gallery is the project of art dealer and curator Cassandra Bird with her husband Fabian Jentsch, an exhibition maker, set designer and artist. As I knock on the door I wonder if it’s the right place, but swiftly Fabian greets me. The energy pulses through the almost-finished space in a continuous current. There is […]
HANDS
The potters work long days in the mud with their hands and feet hardly ever going outside their ceramic world. The pottery compound reminds me of the set of Tatooine from first episode of Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker grew up. George Lucas imagined Tatooine as a place as ancient and as unchanged as this. […]
John Wolseley: The Quiet Conservationist & Ann Greenwood: Following Threads
When John Wolseley arrived in Australia in 1976, he was already a well-trained and well-established thirty-eight-year-old English painter and printmaker with numerous exhibitions to his credit. He had trained at art schools in London, Byam Shaw and the St Martin’s, then worked with S.W. Hayter in Paris, and later at the Birgit Skiöld’s print workshop […]
Posted in Reviews
Tagged Ann Greenwood, Following Threads, Gippsland Art Gallery, John Wolseley, The Quiet Conservationist
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Brett Graham
Such ignorance was symptomatic and systemic. In the introduction to his 2019 book The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga O Aotearoa, Vincent O’Malley writes: “The wars loom large in the national narrative, but we have not always cared to remember or acknowledge them. For much of the period from 1872, most Pākehā clung to […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Brett Graham, Christchurch Art Gallery
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John Meade
“I’ve only realised this within the past decade or so,” he continues, “but looking back, that’s really what it’s been the whole time.” Meade intuitively follows his gut to make sculptures with uncanny personality. Working with industrial materials like concrete, aluminium, automotive paint, wigs, the sculptures he produces have a personality and lifeforce – the […]
Jasper Knight: Dusk to Dawn
“Surface. It doesn’t matter what you paint, your works are about surface.” In his Darlinghurst studio, surrounded by two decades of his work, Knight reflects on this observation, made by Ian Grant, his tutor at the University of New South Wales during Knight’s 2003 master’s degree. Surface, for Knight, was initially the cold, glossy, collaged […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Dusk to dawn, Jasper Knight, Linton and Kay, Linton and Kay Galleries, Sydney Contemporary, The Coral Coast
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Sabio and Her Theatre of the Absurd
“The greatest darkness can often be concealed by an astonishing colour palette of pinks, reds and gold.” – Sabio. Sabio grew up in Railton in the north-west of Tasmania. The seventh of eight children, she left home at seventeen and, after having a daughter, eventually moved to Hobart in 2001. Highly talented with an idiosyncratic […]
Kirtika Kain
Kain migrated with her family from India to Australia in 1993, and during her childhood was shielded from the weight of the Indian caste system. Caste structures form the backbone of the Indian nation; it is a system in which bodies are denoted as sacred or polluted and treated accordingly. The lowest caste of this […]
Vale Jim Cobb
Jim’s commitment to the arts extended far beyond the walls of his paint manufacturing business. He recognized the struggles and challenges faced by aspiring artists, and he made it his mission to provide them with not just the materials required but the support and encouragement they needed to flourish. Countless artists can attest to Jim’s […]
Blue Poles and Doors of Perception
I have read a couple of biographies of Pollock and the man disgusts me. I have a huge collection of art books but never felt the desire to buy one with reproductions of Pollock’s paintings. He was someone I didn’t think I could learn anything from except that art is at its best when it […]
Posted in Ukraine
Tagged Blue Poles, Dispatch series, Doors of Perception, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose
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John R Walker
This year marks twenty years since artist John R Walker, moved to Braidwood in rural New South Wales. It’s also the thirty-fifth anniversary of Utopia Art Sydney, the gallery that has represented Walker since it opened in 1988. Born and raised in Sydney, Walker has always preferred being in the bush to city dwelling. For […]
Posted in Profiles
Tagged John R Walker, Journeys and Return, Orange Regional Gallery
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Artist on Artist: Emma Walker on Kat Shapiro Wood
What kinds of problems and what kinds of meanings happen in paint? What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting? . . . This is where alchemy can help because it is the most developed language for thinking in substances and processes.” – James Elkins, What Painting Is I have the pleasure […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged artist on artist, Emma Walker, Kat Shaprio Wood
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Armando Chant
Media and techniques juxtapose the technological/visual in terms of photography and the material/tactile in textile techniques. The dynamic relationship and binary tensions resulting from combining these techniques result in hybrid and ambiguous imagery between photographic images and materialised surfaces. I begin by sourcing vintage glass negatives of archetypal landscapes that you would see within paintings […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Process
Tagged Armando Chant, Atmosphere, Francis gallery
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Writing Class
The poet presents himself as a dichotomy. Whatever is apparent becomes obscured, and all the luscious facts wither into hard statistics. Born here, did that, intended something else but I forget what. The intruding ‘I’. The breakneck speed on machines of make-believe which finally slow motion curve into the cemetery. Alibis salute the endless proud […]
Markela Panegyres: The Performance Prism
For each artwork, she constructs fictitious personas, notable for their uncanny artifice. It’s by means of these ambiguous characters and their uneasy actions, that Panegyres works through themes of personal trauma, memory, and social commentary. Her art consequently moves between the darkly comedic and disturbing, cultivating an unnerving mix of tension and pathos. In discussing […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged Discovery, Markela Panegyres:, Mimi Kelly, The Performance Prism
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Breathtaking Possibilities
I have spent more than three decades working with artists and communities both in and outside gallery contexts. I find this work profoundly invigorating and relevant. However, I have seen so many awful murals, ceramic projects and the like, made in the name of community art that the term is anathema to me. Since I […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged Anne Loxley, Community Arts and Cultural Development
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VVitches oV KyiV
Our apartment, provided by the Peabody Essex Museum, where the film was screening, is right around the corner from the infamous Old Burying Point Cemetery, also known as the Charter Street Cemetery, which is among the oldest in the United States, opened in 1637. Those accused and convicted of witchcraft in Salem in 1692 were […]
Anselm
Wenders has taken remarkable care in realising this artistic epic. I watched it in 3D glasses at the Sydney Film Festival premiere, the whole time wondering if these were really necessary. As in most art presentations now, the need for entertainment and spectacle creeps in—but hey, this was a theatre, so I went along with […]
Will The Museum Please Move Out Of The Way?
If the Powerhouse Museum’s exhibition A Line A Web A World is anything to go by, drawing is a domain to which we still look for connection with the long continuum of human ingenuity. “Drawings” the exhibition notes state, “are an integral part of the creative process for humankind,” and with 230 drawings from the […]
Posted in Reviews
Tagged A Line A Web A World, Powerhouse Museum
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Brett M. Levine’s Curatorial Intervention: History and Current Practices
Exhibitions of contemporary art are often slick, and in polished spaces, apparently emptied of elements save for the artworks we have come to see. A painting hung here, a sculpture placed there – or perhaps a video work or found object accompanied by labels – and a wall text. Much writing, scholarly and otherwise, has […]
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Tagged Brett M Levine, Curatorial Intervention, Lilian Cameron
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Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line
A Curve is a Broken Line is shaped by testimonials of Iranian-born artist Hoda Afshar, and installed and curated by Isobel Parker Philip at the Art Gallery of NSW. In this hybrid multifaceted exhibition, the Melbourne-based visual storyteller shares with an audience ten years of her reciprocal art projects and collaborative artistic activities. The book […]
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Tagged A curve is a broken line, AGNSW, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hoda Afshar
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NotFair 2023: Alchemy
NotFair, Australia’s perpetually unruly alternative art fair, was founded in 2010 as a satellite event to the Melbourne Art Fair—thus Not The Fair, a title which was rapidly shortened. The notion was to showcase independent artists who do not fit the commercial mould, are overlooked, and under-recognized. Run every second year, with occasional off-shoot projects, […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Alchemy, Melbourne Art Fair, NOTFAIR
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