Author Archives: Artist Profile
Jennifer Keeler-Milne
In Jennifer Keeler-Milne’s Autumn Leaf IV, 2020-21, a single lace-like leaf casts a shadow down the blank field of picture space through which it falls. Keeler-Milne’s ‘Autumn Leaf’ series pictures intricately-drawn leaves falling between one state of being and another: between fullness and emptiness, liveliness and silence, growth and decay. These illustrations were taken from leaves that […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Australian Galleries, Jennifer-Keeler Milne
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Peter Godwin
Peter Godwin takes heart from Picasso’s famous line about Cézanne’s anxiety. It seems to justify his own late-blooming career as an artist who only began to exhibit regularly after the age of 50, enjoying instant success. He once explained his reluctance to show his work by saying he wanted it to be like a brick […]
Posted in Essays, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Peter Godwin
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Chester Nealie
Next to his home in Goanna Ridge, Gulong, is Chester Nealie’s kiln. A few hours’ drive from Bathurst, where his works are currently shown, Nealie lives in concert and collaboration with the natural features of his property. Having moved to Australia from his native New Zealand originally in 1991, Nealie has made a home in […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Chester Nealie
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Rebecca Rath
The oils streaked across the canvases in Rebecca Rath’s ‘Strange and capricious land’ series are robust; resistant. They hold their shape, appearing just like what they are – streaks of oil – rather than like the features of the landscape to which they refer. In The strange and capricious land ii, 2021, a streak of […]
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Tagged Mountain Songs, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, Rebecca Rath
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Leyla Stevens: Labours for Colour
Leyla Stevens makes moving images of ghosts. Working in both speculative and documentary modes of filmmaking, she finds and tells alternative histories, tracing the spectres and remnants of forgotten or willfully erased stories, most often about Bali’s colonial and diasporic past (and present). Her new video work, Labours for Colour, 2021, is the next development in […]
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Tagged Leyla Stevens, Mosman Art Gallery
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Ann Thomson: Osmosis
When Ann Thomson spoke to Bridget Macleod in Artist Profile Issue 35 (2016), she explained that ‘I put my mind into neutral when I paint, and when I’m painting I’m painting.’ From this ‘neutrality’ emerges its opposite: boldly expressive, gestural and memory-charged paintings which work across the figurative and the abstract at once. Since graduating […]
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Tagged Ann Thomson, Defiance Gallery, Osmosis
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The Dark Side
Snell cites Rainer Maria Rilke on the utility of difficult feeling in artmaking: ‘don’t take my devils away, because my angels might flee too.’ One central claim of this exhibition, after Rilke, is that experiences of mental illness can be catalysts for work that is of value aesthetically, socially, and intellectually. Much of the work […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Anna Nazzari, Carla Adams, D'Arcy Coad, Edith Cowan University, Lyndall Adams, Marcella Poulain, Mary Moore, Nicola Kaye, Paul Uhlmann, Roderick Sprigg, Sharyn Egan, Stephen Terry, Stormie Mills, Tarryn Gill, Ted Snell, The Dark Side
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Daniel Domig
Throughout his nearly two-decade career as a painter, Domig has remained committed to the figure. His paintings are explorations, extrapolations, and instantiations of the body, rather than simple representations of it. Domig has cited Francis Bacon as a kind of artistic hero of his, and the lineage is clear: like Bacon’s, Domig’s figures are contorted, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles, Reviews
Tagged Chalk Horse, Daniel Domig, Teach Us to Sit Still
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Meat Mirror
Meat Mirror, which moves to the Gold Coast this month after premiering at the Brisbane Art and Design Festival, emerges from a set of social conditions unique to our particular moment in human history. As Louise Martin-Chew, who writes the show’s exhibition text, notes, the performance-activated video installation responds in part to a 2018 Four Corners […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Jay Younger, Lisa O'Neill, Meat Mirror, The Walls
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Marea Gazzard
Bindu (white), 1995-2005, stands at one end of the space at Utopia. ‘Stands’ is an important descriptor here, rather than just a functional verb: these forms feel alive, resolute, and eloquent even in their obvious restraint and subtlety. They hold their stand; they ask us to stand to attention. This gathering of rectangular vessels in […]
Gabrielle Courtenay
In a catalogue essay for Courtenay’s upcoming exhibition at ARO Gallery, I See You, Tracey Clement describes the artist’s world-building work as ‘post-apocalyptic.’ There is a pervasive sense of unease in many of Courtenay’s landscapes, as in her sculptures of emaciated, contorted tree-like forms. Deep, moody chiaroscuro shadow plays over Courtenay’s hills, and even over […]
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Jo Darvall
Just off-centre in Jo Darvall’s Mooro Katta No. 4, 2020, is a stroke of warm, rambunctious yellow paint; it forms the shape of an arrow, pointed left. Below this, an arrow, this time in earthen brown, points down to the bottom of the frame. Following the perspective of the painting back through the forest of native trees, […]
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Tagged Jo Darvall, Linton and Kay Galleries, Wandoo
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Tim Olsen: Son of the Brush
When the great Canadian-born painter Philip Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer wrote a compelling biography Night Studio (1988) about the problems of having a never-around workaholic father, many were shocked by his apparent parental neglect. And it was not just his daughter; like so many artist couples her mother, also called Musa (McKim), was a talented […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Essays
Tagged Son of the Brush, Tim Olsen
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Issue 54
In This Issue EDITOR’S NOTE As its social and political implications have unpacked over the last half-century, the word ‘identity’ has continued to accumulate meanings. From ‘self’ to ‘individuality’, the idea came to include a question of the separation of majority and minority, good and bad, black and white. Then as we came to see/feel […]
Posted in Back Issues
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Nancy Constandelia
It’s half past eight in the morning. I’m on a ferry from somewhere to elsewhere. You can be halfway between two points, like half past eight, a temporal position between eight and nine o’clock. This is the common use of ‘half past.’ But, what does it mean for the past to be halved? What is […]
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Tagged James Gatt, MARS Gallery, Nancy Costandelia
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Jo Bertini
After nearly three decades of traversing, contemplating and capturing desert landscapes throughout Australia and across the world, Jo Bertini found a true connection to the desert of New Mexico, where she now lives and works. In this new suite of paintings, entitled ‘Songs of Dry Hills’, Bertini takes her desert home of New Mexico as […]
Posted in Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Arthouse gallery, Jo Bertini, Songs of the Dry Hills
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NotFair
With a grassroots structure and ethos that has endured over eleven years, NotFair prioritises the experience of exhibiting artists. At the centre of this model is a focus on ensuring that artists can receive a fair portion of profits from any sale of work, and an emphasis on the opportunity that the event provides for […]
Kaylene Whiskey
In Whiskey’s new show, ‘Sistas,’ we’re in good company: Dolly Parton, Cher, Tina Turner, Catwoman, and David Hasselhoff are with us. The works across this show, with their exuberant playfulness, and their insistence on humour and pleasure, take as their launch point the painting Seven Sistas Story, 2021. Here, the figure of Hasselhoff stands in for the Wati Nyiru […]
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Tagged Kaylene Whiskey, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
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Owen Leong
In a sense, many hands have participated in the makings of Leong’s ‘Intimate Debris’ series, on view now at Artereal Gallery, Sydney. Looking into his sculptures, hung from the wall or stood against it on crates, we see the remnants of production processes that span across both space and time. There are, in these works, […]
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Tagged Artereal Gallery, Owen Leong
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DRAW: Attending to the World Through Mark-Making
The catalogue essay for this exhibition opens with the claim that drawing – and, especially, ‘observational’ drawing – emerges from a practice of sustained attention. The artist, that is, is supposed to spend open stretches of time taking in, through the special osmosis of the eyes, the world that they render over again in their […]
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Tagged Alexandra Sasse Gallery, Draw
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Reg Mombassa: Simplisticism III – Shadowland
The text-based work which operates as a manifesto for Mombassa’s current show declares that ‘Simplisticism is a new global art movement, religion, and political party. I am the leader of this movement and to date the sole member. The people that join the movement will be called Simplistics, or, for short, Simpletons.’ The self-knowing irony, […]
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Tagged Reg Mombassa, Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Simplisticism
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Bernard Ollis
Ollis creates – rather than replicates – visions of the working spaces of a number of significant Australian and European artists in these new works. We have the studios of Elisabeth Cummings and Guy Warren, and Ollis’ own Erskineville backyard complete with what would seem to be a Matisse mural. Further afield, we are drawn […]
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Tagged Bernard Ollis, Mitchell Fine Art
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Clarice Beckett: Power in the Present Moment
But there was distraction. As I went from dramatic image to exhilarating abstract whirls of colour, my eye kept going to two small paintings hanging beside each other at the end of the adjacent gallery. By contrast with the gestures and the commentary of the Americans, the little pictures seemed — self-contained. One shone with […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions, Profiles, Reviews, Uncategorized
Tagged Art Gallery of South Australia, Clarice Beckett, The present Moment
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HOTA: Home of the Arts
HOTA Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Solid Gold: Artists from Paradise,’ and its first public opening, take place this week in Surfers Paradise. Two significant public art commissions in the gallery’s grounds mark these events in Queensland – and, indeed, in broader Australian – art. Judy Watson, a Waanyi artist, responds to the site on which HOTA […]
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Tagged HOTA, Judy Watson, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
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