Author Archives: Artist Profile
Atong Atem at photo basel
Atem told the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in an interview after she was awarded the La Prairie Art Award, that her photographic practice is also a deeply painterly one: it encompasses the craft and sensuality of the costuming and mis-en-scene of her stylised studio set-ups. In her instantly recognisable images – each nonetheless […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Atong Atem, MARS Gallery, Photo Basel
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Jess MacNeil
MacNeil moved with her parents to a bush block in the Bega Valley aged six. Having lived and worked overseas throughout her career, she returned to the region in 2019, to find it marked by the fires of that summer and the destruction to both human and natural ecosystems that ran in their wake. Responding […]
Fragile Earth: Extinction
Curators Louisa Waters and Melanie Caple have chosen “extinction” as the theme for this inaugural iteration of Fragile Earth in response to the particular concerns of local artists. Especially, they are responding to the actions taken by a group of Gippsland-based artists led by Dawn Stubbs, who have made and exhibited art under the collective name CARE: […]
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Tagged Fragile Earth, Gippsland Art Gallery
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Nicole Ellis
At first blush, there seems to be some kind of code to the arrangement of the small paper dots across the canvas of Nicole Ellis’s Confetti, 2006. Properly, “dots” might be an oversimplification here. Rather, these scraps – which Ellis salvaged from the streets in Rome – bear the marks of their manufacture in the array of […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Drill Hall Gallery, Liverpool Street Gallery, Nicole Ellis
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Sydney Contemporary 2022
Artist Profile is proud to be a Major Partner of Sydney Contemporary 2023, working with leading independent curators 3:33 Art Projects to present Origins and Imagination a group exhibition of new works by Bella Bruzzese, David Griggs, Heidi Yardley, India Mark, Mai Nguyễn-Long, Telly Tu’u, Reg Mombassa and Zoe Young at this year’s fair. Catalogue […]
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The Silence of Ani
Video is what the Poet sees in one of those crypts they keep for art today, sees windswept hills, rubble of a medieval Armenian city, hears birds calling, bird-calling, the Hidden sought by ears, eyes, those children who, in the quest for an avian empire, echo Attar, his impossible conference. This poem was originally published […]
Letters from Ukraine: 25/06/22 – Bonnie and Clyde
Kate took a platform snap of Hellen and I leaning back on the departure train from Kyiv – it was like the shots of Bonnie and Clyde posing with their guns against a getaway car. We have that outlaw look. I often say that what we do is not much different to robbing banks. Back […]
Posted in Ukraine
Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Catherine Cassidy
In a recent statement, Cassidy described her interest in deep ecological time, as it changes and sculpts the land on which she works. Travelling as far north as the Gregory River, in to the Finke River, and out to Lake Eyre, Cassidy observes the marks that the passage of millennia leaves around her. “I find […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Catherine Cassidy, Defiance Gallery, painting
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Pearlescent Semblances, Perfect Parallels – Pippin Drysdale’s The Patterning of Light
Boasting more than 450 exhibitions both in Australia and internationally and having had over fifty solo exhibitions, Drysdale is revered as Australia’s most internationally successful ceramicist (McDonald, 2020). Despite her five-decade-long career, this is the artist’s first solo showing with Australian Galleries – and one that promises genuine delight. Drysdale’s notoriety is formidable; perhaps even […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Australian Galleries, ceramics, Pippin Drysdale
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Land Abounds
The exhibition’s title, Land Abounds, hints at the many possibilities that a gathering of this calibre may reveal. I am told by curator Megan Monte that the exhibition is set around three themes which are based on Tracey Moffatt’s three videos, Love, 2003, Revolution, 2008, and Doomed, 2007. Monte has applied a curatorial rationale which […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, tracey moffatt
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Issue 58
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work. EDITOR’S NOTE Throughout this issue of Artist Profile we feature exhibitions demonstrating the rich diversity of Australasian artists locally and abroad. It’s exciting for us to be able to critique their many groundbreaking moments. Salvatore Zofrea, […]
Posted in Back Issues
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Bronwyn Bancroft
Bundjalung Country, known as the land of the three rivers, is located across northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, with the boundaries being roughly created by the Clarence River, the Great Dividing Range, and the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps non-Indigenous Australians would be more familiar with Bundjalung Country when they realised that towns such as […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Bronwyn Bancroft, Grafton Regional Gallery
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Paul Yore
In typical fashion for Yore, the title of this new work makes a whole web of references at once. Prophetic, or even polemical in tone, it’s also deeply mundane: it’s found text. The artist recounts coming across the phrase, attributed the seventeenth-century English clergyman Thomas Fuller, and being surprised that our familiar quip, “seeing is […]
New Energy
Kalanjay Dhir, Jonathan Kim, Audrey Newton, Luce Nguyễn-Hunt, Nathan Nhan, Angie Pai, Nadia Refaei, EJ Son, and Zoe Wong bring new and recent works to 4A, in an expansive show encompassing an array of media and ideas. Key nodes around which the works of these artists orbit are billed to be body politics, intergenerational culture, […]
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Fridays in the Park (or how to make a boy holy)
& i can’t help but notice his hips first, bumbag slung low, as the train doors open at Roxburgh Park. & i take in the trackies, his shadowed jaw, the slabs of concrete arcing over him. & as Arab boys are timeless or else stuck in time, i breathe easier in their pause, their familiar […]
Posted in Contents, Poems
Tagged Omar Sakr, Poetry, Son of Sin
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Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation
Antoinette LaFarge’s Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation is a thought-provoking analysis into the realms of fictive art. LaFarge uses “parafact” for fiction “too strange not to be real,” though it has also been called “superfiction” by Scottish-Australian artist and writer Peter Hill and “parafiction” by US theorist Carrie Lambert-Beatty. LaFarge’s fictive art […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Contents
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Recollections
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery is located at Abbotsleigh School, an institution historically grounded in particular kinds of knowledge, and ways of passing on that knowledge. Clearly, though, the gallery has committed to investigating the social and cultural histories from which it emerges. Golding’s curation for Recollections – which focusses on the work of women from […]
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Tagged Dennis Golding, Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Recollections
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Nicola Mason
Nicola Mason left her former profession in conservation and land care in mid-2016, to focus full-time on her artmaking. A local to Wiradjuri Country in regional New South Wales, she went on, after her first career, to study at the painting workshop of the Australian National University, and at UNSW Art & Design. In Cycle, a solo […]
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Tagged Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Nicola Mason
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Letters from Ukraine: 17/06/22 – The Old Russian Dog
Watching Putin on TV, May Day, May 9th, from our bomb shelter bedroom in Odessa, interested me not because of the moment when he was up on his podium, but the “theatrical performance,” his “ploy,” appearing as “one of the people” when he marched the streets disguised, truly I felt, like a wolf in sheep’s […]
Living in Queer Times
“Queer” is a complex and fluid term. Historically it meant “strange” or “peculiar,” but from the late nineteenth century it came to be used as a slur against people expressing same sex desires. The contemporary usage of queer as an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender began in the 1980s, when […]
Shammgods
Our practice plays with the changing nature of cultural capital by pitting the sacredness and precariousness of the “live” in performance against ways of commodifying it and creating surplus value through ongoing forms of paratextual presence, both online and through performative interventions into everyday life. Our performances emerge out of an engagement with the work […]
Anna Johnson
Johnson’s engagement with her influences – abstract expressionism, post-impressionism, early modernism, Monet, Clyfford Still – is ambivalent, and yet unburdened with the irony that characterises a lot of work on history and the archive produced today. In an interview for Intention with Rachael Parsons, Johnson described the experience of an artist (especially, but not only a woman […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged AK Bellinger Gallery, Anna Johnson, painting
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Cementa22
Three and a half hours from Sydney via the Blue Mountains, Kandos was built in the early twentieth century to support the NSW Cement, Lime and Coal Co Ltd. A true late industrial (and now post-industrial) town, its former cement works and surrounding infrastructure are inhabited for four days and nights by artists and audiences […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 16/6/22 – Art Car
It has been a long time since I have experienced something as damaging as the Kibeho massacre in Rwanda but the Bridge of Death at Irpin comes close. Like with the work I did about Rwanda, I knew I had to create at least one major work about the bridge. The cars were removed and […]
