Meagan Streader
To encounter Meagan Streader’s work is to experience the phenomenon of light, not just as a series of wavelengths that bounce off surfaces to reveal the physical world, but as something itself physical, relational and emotional. Slow Rinse, 2019, presented at Dark Mofo, is one of a series of site-specific works made with white electroluminescent […]
Posted in Profiles
Tagged Light, MARS Gallery, Meagan Streader, The Tie Factory
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Nasim Nasr
The word “freedom” is at the centre of humanity – to be human is to be free, to relate to others, spaces, and places without restrictions or persecution. Iranian-born and Sydney-based artist Nasim Nasr explores the concept of freedom through her multidisciplinary practice. As a young child growing up in Iran, her artistic talent was […]
Tricky Walsh
Tricky Walsh appears on my laptop screen, their voice slightly distorted as we converse over distance through a shaky network from one regional part of Tasmania to another: it’s a Zoom conversation. This is how we get in touch. It’s a bit like science fiction, but it’s also a bit daggy – the future is […]
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Tagged MARS Gallery, Melbourne, painting, sculpture, tasmania, Tricky Walsh
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Jenna Lee
Up until recently this process was applied almost exclusively to copies of the book “Aboriginal Words and Place Names.” whereby I would tear, pulp, weave and burn the pages, healing and transforming them into new objects of cultural beauty and pride. The homogenising of books filled with words ripped from their connection to people and […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Beneath the surface (of the billabong), Jenna Lee, MARS Gallery
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Damien Shen
“Entombed in Joy” might be a contradiction in terms, but so are, in some sense, the paintings that it names. In Shen’s most buoyant body of work of his career, cartoon characters and emblems familiar to him as a kid growing up in the 1980s are juxtaposed against punch-coloured shields with patterns of Shen’s Ngarrindjeri […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Damien Shen, Entombed in Joy, MARS Gallery, NAIDOC week
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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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Peter Hill’s Top Ten Picks from Sydney Contemporary 2022
Peter Schjeldahl, the great American art critic for The Village Voice, and now The New Yorker, once described the visceral experience of viewing the astonishing late works of Willem de Kooning at the Metropolitan. “The effect was like a plane taking off, when the acceleration presses you against the seat. The painting’s violent intelligence detonated […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged ARC ONE Gallery, Bett Gallery, Carriageworks, Darren Knight Gallery, Egg & Dart, Fox Jensen Gallery, GAGPROJECTS, How Langsford, James Makin Gallery, MARS Gallery, Michael Bugelli Gallery, National Art School, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Contemporary, THIS IS NO FANTASY
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Dani McKenzie
In 2017, Dani McKenzie’s work was imbued with a strange nostalgic melancholy. She was undertaking a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and her paintings, which were based on found photography, were infused with mystery as neither the artist or viewer could know the history or the context of the images. They […]
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Tagged Dani McKenzie, MARS Gallery, Olsen Gallery
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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 […]
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Tagged Atong Atem, MARS Gallery, Photo Basel
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Micke Lindebergh
When looking at Swedish artist Micke Lindebergh’s recent paintings, it is difficult not to feel a sense of joy. Relying on a carefully chosen palette of his favourite acrylic paints, Lindebergh is heavily influenced by the block colours and floral motifs celebrated by Scandinavian design houses like Marimekko and 10-gruppen. Growing up in Stockholm in […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions, Uncategorized
Tagged MARS Gallery, Micke Lindebergh
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James Tapscott
Humans have devised ways of creating sculptural forms out of almost any known or available materials at hand. Stone, metal, timber, glass and plastics. Hair and bone, mud and bark have all been put to use. Even light and fire have been conquered via fireworks through to lasers over the millennia. But water has proven […]
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Tagged James Tapscott, MARS Gallery
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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 […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles, Reviews
Tagged James Gatt, MARS Gallery, Nancy Costandelia
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Belle Bassin
In a thoughtful, peripatetic catalogue essay for Belle Bassin’s ‘A Form Arriving,’ Jasmine Proust reflects on the feminism adhering to art by women, even when it is not overtly feminist in its subject matter: making art, she claims, is ‘a miracle, no less than bringing life into the world, and it is met with the […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged A Form Arriving, Belle Bassin, MARS Gallery
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Ces McCully
I raise Sherman and Kruger here because in many respects Ces McCully is their direct descendant. Sherman, who utilised photographic self-portraiture, to question self-identity is relevant, I believe, because in many ways McCully’s work feels almost painfully like a form of self-portraiture. McCully is by no means a figurative artist, but her haiku-style texts more […]
Jenny Crompton
Indigenous Australian artist Jenny Crompton creates effervescent sculptures that ignite environmental awareness.
