Author Archives: Artist Profile
Brendan Van Hek
The title of your current exhibition at Sarah Cottier Gallery, new and unrelated works, brings to the fore an idea of modularity – or of component parts coming into configuration together – which (I think) has rippled through some of your shows in the past too. How did you piece together this exhibition, and how […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Brendan Van Hek, Sarah Cottier Gallery
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Who is Jordan Wolfson, Anyway?
When it became known last year that the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) had commissioned an artwork by a controversial American artist that few Australians had ever heard of and had paid AUD 6.8 million for it, public and critics alike were aghast. Journalists rushed into print to damn the work unseen and to question […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Jordan Wolfson, Michael Young, National Gallery of Australia
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Gordon Shepherdson
With the sad news of Gordon Shepherdson’s passing on 18 July 2019, we look back to Issue 42 when Louise Martin-Chew wrote about the artist’s inspiring perception of painting.
Paths that don’t go where people want them to: Aesthetic (Un)usability in the Paintings of Abbey Rich
It would come as no surprise then, that my conversations with Abbey generally begin here. How could they not. Abbey has an ability to choose exactly the right tones, to incorporate different hues and shades. When we met, Abbey had just started developing a new body of work and I would often find myself in […]
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Tagged Abbey Rich, MARS Gallery
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Katherine Hattam
Katherine Hattam’s Melbourne house and studio sing with her paintings, in clear, bright sharply defined colours.
FLIGHT: Q&A with Luke Létourneau
The sweep of this exhibition, from a curatorial perspective, seems to capture so much: a multi-layered topic, and both local practitioners and “big names.” How did you formulate your rationale for the project, and what kinds of curatorial work went into developing it? For us as an arts centre, FLIGHT was our way of doing […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Amy Perejuan-Capone, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Chris Caines, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, FLIGHT, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Linda Brescia, Luke Letournea
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John Wolseley: Intelligence with the Earth
“I suppose it all started when my mother committed suicide, when I was five.” John speaks deeply, slowly, every word heavy with the weight of a lifetime. Boulders roll off his tongue with heart-knocking profundity, and yet he is impossibly eloquent, sentences feather-light and frank. John tells me about the origins of his love for the […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Elli Walsh, John Wolseley, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
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The Mirror and the Palette
“She looks at herself, again and again. She’s in London or Paris or Helsinki or Sydney. She’s in a village by the sea or a hamlet in the mountains, in a room, a studio, a flat, a place, however small, she can call her own. She’s a mother, she’s childless, she’s straight, she’s queer, in […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Contents
Tagged Brooke Boland, Hachette, Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette
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Queer Contemporary
Coinciding with Sydney WorldPride 2023 and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, QUEER CONTEMPORARY 2023 comprises two major exhibitions, a suite of public programs, key community partnerships, and site activations, all hosted at the historic Darlinghurst campus in February. Oscillating between notions of queerness in historical and contemporary artworks, yet consistently re-centring on the […]
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Tagged Braving Time, Fulgora, National Art School, Queer Contemporary
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Ryan Presley
Ryan Presley’s work is full of symbolism, but I also like to think of it as testing the line between iconography and insignia, directing viewers to consider rank and responsibility, status and standing. Presley, who has both Aboriginal and Scandinavian ancestry, is fascinated by official/unofficial roles and jurisdictions, creating works of a predominantly illustrative bent […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Fres Hell, Gertrude Contemporary, Ryan Presley
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Lindy Lee
Recently, I read an acquaintance’s reflection that the condition of embodiment is almost always embarrassment, shame, or discomfort of some kind. In Western, (post)Christian cultures we think of material life this way: the cycles of health underscored by sickness, the punctuation of life with death, the rot and riot of organic world around us. The […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Lindy Lee, Tweed Regional Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre
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Philip Noakes
Noakes captures light with his hammer. He raises extraordinary three-dimensional objects from flat sheets of metal, and the shifting patterns of marks left by his hammer trap and direct the flow of light around his completed forms. The seductive material and its exquisite shapes are revealed by this flow of light, which our eyes eagerly […]
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Tagged Australian Galleries, Philip Noakes
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Belem Lett
Desire lines are the ultimate unbiased interpretation of natural human and animal intent – referring to tracks worn across grassy patches that generally represent the most easily navigated route between origin and destination. In that Deleuzian way, the theory of desire as a productive force, a force that is real without ceasing to be ideal, […]
Thea Anamara Perkins: Stockwoman
Throughout the summer, Sydney’s Carriageworks is host to Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins’s Stockwoman, 2022. The mural, with two component parts, wraps around the walls of the former industrial space, intermittently cut through with light from the high windows as the sun moves across them. In the sky of the painting itself rests […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions, Uncategorized
Tagged Aarna Hanley, Carriageworks, N.Smith Gallery, Stockwoman, Sydney Festival, Thea Anamara Perkins, Thea Perkins
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Sol LeWitt: Affinities and Resonances
The exhibition takes its name from a quote from LeWitt, where he professed “a great affinity” for the works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, while the “resonances” part of the show refers to live musical performances. Chuck Johnson and JWPATON, a Yuin musician, performed at the John Kaldor Family Hall on Wednesday 31 August at 8:00 […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Aleks Wansbrough, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gloria Tamerre Petyarre, So LeWitt: Affinities and Resonances, Sol LeWitt, Sydney Modern
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Into the Mystic
Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on 12 June 2021 to incredible critical acclaim and fervent public interest. The escalating Delta crisis in Sydney led to the exhibition’s premature closure after just fourteen days, but during its brief but brilliant moment in the light, artists Katy […]
Posted in Contents, Essays
Tagged Byzantia Harlow, Into the Mystic, Kate Mitchell, Pippa Mott, Shana Moulton
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Joe Furlonger: Horizons
Joe Furlonger was born in Cairns in 1952. He grew up in the rural (now semi-rural) Samford Valley near Brisbane. As an adult he worked as a farmhand and on fishing boats, attended art schools in Brisbane and Sydney and, after a period of gestation and experimentation, launched an artistic career that has sustained over […]
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Tagged goma, Horizons, Joe Furlonger, QAGOMA, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
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“Living next to the sea was like having tragedy for a neighbour”
Opera, in a school hall, the voices impossible and good, sudden throng of them lost in the bad acoustics, singers singing to a feeling they haven’t felt yet. Ten or eleven, some have swum in all the sea’s moods already and only ever fancied the idea of it, Love as abstract to them as Truth […]
Posted in Contents, Poems
Tagged Louis Klee
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Annika Koops
In Koops’s Double Binds #10, 2022, traces of oil paint are at once lyrical and jarringly inert. A creamy strip of what looks like fabric – maybe ribbon – drapes eternally over a frame of metallic blue curves, which work their way down the image plane like a racetrack seen from above, or like a worm from another […]
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Tagged Annika Koops, Bett Gallery, FRAME: A Biennial of Dance
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6 × 6 × 6” Miniature Sculpture Show
The Miniature Sculpture Show has hosted a staggering number of artists since its first iteration in 1996, held at the original Defiance Gallery premises in Newtown. The gallery’s aim, for twenty-six years, has been to develop a greater public understanding of the place of sculpture in contemporary Australian art, and the Miniature Sculpture Show has been […]
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Tagged 6 × 6 × 6” Miniature Sculpture Show, Defiance Gallery
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Deborah Kelly
Here, Deborah Kelly’s collage characters are animated into ecstatic dance on the brink of political and environmental collapse. The Gods of Tiny Things was produced by attendees of a “collage camp” at Bundanon on Yuin Country, and forms part of Many Hands Make Life Work – Deborah Kelly and the Moving Image 2011–2021 at Maitland Regional […]
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Tagged ACMI, Benalla Art Gallery, Bundanon Trust Artist-in-Residence, Deborah Kelly, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, QAGOMA, Queensland Art Gallery
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Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition
I’ve overheard your theory, “Nostalgia’s for geeks” I guess sir, if you say so, some of us just like to read One second I’m a Koons fan, suddenly the Koons is me Pop culture was in art, now art’s pop culture, in me. Rhyming “me” with “me” is extraordinary of course (if mainly in its […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Contents, Reviews
Tagged Adam Geczy, Bloomsbury, Gaga Aesthetics, Vicki Karaminas
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Peter Booth
“A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of human beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also […]
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Tagged Peter Booth, TarraWarra Museum of Art
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