Author Archives: Artist Profile
Steve Lopes Encountered
I go backwards and forwards . . . I live between two worlds, in my head. Steve Lopes is an artist who finds himself at once both everywhere, and nowhere. An inveterate traveller since his youth, his insatiable curiosity for new experiences drives his art and desire to tell stories, connecting the threads of history […]
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Tagged Orange Regional Gallery, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Steve Lopes
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Teho Ropeyarn and Elisa Jane Carmichael
Likenesses are easy to draw between Carmichael and Ropeyarn: both are flourishing in their early-to-mid careers as artmakers, exhibiting in significant group shows across public institutions, and working closely with both Country and community. With Carmichael’s work closing recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists, and Ropeyarn’s opening at the […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Elisa Jane Carmichael, Onespace Gallery, Primavera, Tarnanthi, Teho Ropeyarn
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Letters from Ukraine: 12/04/22 – Dulce et Decorum est . . . the horror
“The goal is tied to the pressure and the pressure is tied to the fight inside of me” – this part of a sermon from Father Pfleger of Saint Sabina Church, Englewood, South Side, Chicago rings in my ears now and keeps my tears and fears in check. The priests from the church up on […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 12/04/22 – Antonov
Whenever I have been with peacekeepers in places like Cambodia and Somalia, I have found myself hitching rides in Antonov transport planes as they transport aid cargos. They always had “no frills” interiors, which displayed an engineer’s priority for function over smooth presentation. My memories associate Antonov planes with international aid. I always assumed they were Russian-made, […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 11/04/22 – House of Art
We made the decision, back in Australia, to try to stay at Maidan – the square of the 2013-4 heroic Euromaidan protests, where after months of protest through a freezing winter and many deaths and disappearances, the pro-Putin President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to make a midnight flight to Russia. The Euromaidan protesters combined beautiful […]
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Kyoko Imazu
A feline figure looks us almost in the eye in Beetle Spotting, 2018. Offering this slant gaze at once curious and evasive, the cat’s face is captivating – their whiskers tremulous and sensitive against a “featureless” background. Refusing to offer either geographical or perspectival specificity, this washed background strikes against the intense and textured particularity of […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Australian Galleries, ceramics, Etching, Kyoko Imazu, printmaking
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10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
It is not the first time I have seen the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) in its planning stage, witnessing the potential scale of the event via models of the galleries of both of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) buildings, again dominated by the overarching footprint of […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Uncategorized
Tagged APT, Asia Pacific Triennial, goma, QAGOMA
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Letters from Ukraine: 10/04/21 – Volkzal’na Street, Bucha
Today in Bucha, they have cleared most of the civilian dead from the streets and basement cellars holding winter preserves – slaughtered, tortured, and raped by the Russian soldiers, who here in Ukraine they are laughing sadistic “demon gods,” destroying homes and killing civilians “for fun” . . . I wonder what it takes to […]
23rd Biennale of Sydney: rīvus
Though it’s only the opening day of the Biennale, much has already been made of the “participants” – not so much the selection of international and Australian peer artists for the program, but their appellation as participants, rather than the more conventional “artists.” The rationale for this lexical turn seems to have been mainly twofold. Emphasising a […]
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Tagged 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Biennale of Sydney
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Her Light Materials: Penelope Seidler
Penelope Seidler has a powerful public presence. Hers is what millennials would define as a “big life.” Involved and curious, she makes her way from undergrad openings in Sydney to the bold face events in Europe and the Museum of Modern Art in New York where she has been a member of the International Council […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Profiles
Tagged Anna Johnson, Architecture, Harry Seidler, Penelope Seidler, Textiles
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Letters from Ukraine: 05/04/22 to 09/04/22 – Remains
BORODYANKA On Tuesday we followed a convoy of animal rescue ambulances and trucks to a pet shelter in Borodyanka. The dog rescue team has several very well-equipped animal ambulances: two white and three red with silhouette profiles of a dog and a cat superimposed under the name “STAR.” The lead vehicle is a large red […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Ukraine
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Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State
The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, a project of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), is the nation’s longest-running curated survey of contemporary Australian art. The Biennial is part of the Adelaide Festival, and since its inception in 1990 has exhibited nearly 500 artists to over one million visitors. It is a major exhibition […]
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Tagged Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Angela Valamanesh, Art Gallery of South Australia, Dean Cross, Dennis Golding, Hossein Valamanesh, Julie Rrap, Stanislava Pinchuk, tracey moffatt
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Letters from Ukraine: 04/04/22 – Ladies of Kyiv
As we walk around exploring the world, it is like having a dream then waking up to find that its real. We visit small shops that are still open to get supplies. Each store has different things that the other hasn’t got, but these places are a gathering point for the locals, also becoming a […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Letters from Ukraine: 03/04/22 – The Rock
There is a sense of possible victory in the air that is rising with the spring tulips that are beginning to push their way up from the soil. When we got on the train, with Kyiv as our destination, we did not know if we would ever get out, and each day seemed like we […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Peter Powditch
There was so much about Peter Powditch that made him the quintessential male Australian artist of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in 1942 he was an easy-going, drinking, smoking baby boomer. He revelled in the summer sun and beach culture while simply portraying what he loved in his surroundings. There was no […]
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Tagged Ian Milliss, Peter Powditch, Tribute
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Letters from Ukraine: 1/04/22 – Saint Jon in Kyiv
Before I knew my friend Jon Lewis was dying from dementia, I met up with him in Sydney and walked over to the Mitchell Library, where he was proud to show me his exhibition of street portraits. I miss Jon deeply and wish he was here in Kyiv. He would be out capturing the faces […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Letters from Ukraine: 31/03/22 – Russian Roulette
When Hellen and I arrived here a week ago, today, every hour felt like we were literally playing Russian Roulette with our lives. Bombs and missiles were raining down all around Kyiv and the TV news was anything but heartening. The good news is that we have found our feet and begun to think this […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Sam Field
I thought I saw Eden brings together a suite of paintings produced in the aftermath of Sam Field’s journey throughout Far North Queensland. Interrogating the act and impulse of travelling, Field contemplates the assumptions, projections, and mythologies that permeate our experiences of “othered” places. Embedded within the series is a reflection on innocence lost: the […]
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Tagged Despard Gallery, Pippa Mott, Sam Field
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Matisse: Life & Spirit and Matisse Alive
Without his touch, Matisse would not exist for us. We can recognise his work by its radical composition, the lyricism of its colour and the utter clarity of the artist’s final phase, but before these qualities could blossom there was an initial impulse, born of the liberated touch of the late nineteenth century. The freedom to […]
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Tagged AGNSW, Angela Tiatia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Centre Pompidou, Joe Frost, Matisse Alive, Matisse: Life & Spirit, Nina Chanel Abney, Robin White, Sally Smart
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Letters from Ukraine: 29/03/22 – Guardians
Over the last week we have become familiar to the Ukrainian soldiers at the corner of our street and Maidan Square – have grown used to us passing. I decided today was the right time to make friends. If the Russians get this far into Kyiv it will be block-by-block street fighting, and these will […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Letters from Ukraine: 27/03/22 – Vodka
When I was nineteen in New York in 1968/9, I got a job at IBM and my boss was Mr Wallager (not sure of the spelling, and I never knew his first name), who was Russian. He was a wonderful, kind man who let me get away with murder. My job was to illustrate investor […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Letters from Ukraine: 25/03/22 – Our Stand
With the sound of bombs and missiles in the distance, we just did an interview with ABC Illawarra. We could hear in the voice of Melinda, the journalist, that she was clearly moved. I told the story of “The Kiss.” People are writing back saying “The Kiss” turns our stand into a romance – a […]
Letters from Ukraine: 24/03/2022 – The Kiss
Our apartment is within a couple of hundred meters of Maidan Square where the Orange Revolution occurred in 2004 and the bloody Euromaidan protests of 2014. Possibly not a smart place to be as it is the symbolic centre of opposition to Russian rule, its alternative name being Independence Square. Up until now, the most […]
Letters from Ukraine: 23/03/22 – Night Train
Our Aussie mate and art collector Mike Haly, who runs a mining company in Poland, organised a thirty-six-year-old executive, Mateusz, to pick us up from our Krakow Hotel and drive four hours to the railway station where trains leave for Lviv. We chatted happily with Mateusz and enjoyed seeing the Polish countryside, as we cruised along at 140 […]
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