Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i Art Guide Australia

Rosella Namok Recent Paintings Rosella Namok Japingka Aboriginal Art 16 July—17 August Rosella Namok’s abstract paintings are all about colour. Bold lines, often different hues of the same colour, tell stories of Country and family from the Ungkum artist’s home in Far North Queensland. Using decorative finger painting and scraping techniques, Namok’s art is her interpretation of the lush landscape that surrounds her throughout the seasons: the sun, the sea, lagoons and bamboo thickets, tropical rain from morning to evening. She also includes clan designs from her community. Her latest exhibition showcases 28 new paintings, all created during lockdown in 2020. The paintings tend towards the lighter side of the colour spectrum, bringing a soft playfulness, and vary from smaller to large-scale works. “These paintings for me have a sense…

In 2015, Sydney-based artist Caroline Rothwell undertook a residency at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. While there, she had access to the original colour plates used to create Joseph Banks’s Florilegium, an illustrated document of botanical specimens collected during Captain Cook’s voyages around the Pacific, from 1768 to 1771. Systematically gathering thousands of specimens, Banks eventually took botanicals from Kamay/Botany Bay, the site of first contact between Europeans and the traditional owners of the Dharawal nation. Using a set of prints from Banks’s Florilegium as a conceptual springboard, Rothwell has created Horizon, an exhibition of sculpture, drawing and animation. It explores the increasingly entangled connection between humans and nature. Taking a visual cue from the landscape around Sydney’s Hazelhurst Gallery, much of Horizon was conceived…

“I’m often talking about really tough things, and making them into comedy makes them manageable. But it also disarms people.”—KATY B PLUMMER Katy B Plummer is like a one-person film industry. She is the costumier, set designer, propmaker, star and director of her own unique style of genre-busting videos that tread a clever and fertile line between being laugh-out-loud funny and deeply troubling. Her elaborate props and costumes are sculptures in their own right, and they demand both attention and physical space. With a renowned practice, Plummer pulls at the threads of pre-existing cultural narratives, prompting political, personal and existential questions. When Art Guide visited Plummer in her Carriageworks studio in Sydney, the artist spoke about relishing having space to herself while surrounded by other artists, as well as making…

Art from the Margins Gallery and Studios www.artfromthemargins.org.au 136 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, QLD 4006 07 3151 6655 Mon to Fri 10am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 24 May—9 July Sweet Silent Thoughts An Emerging Artists exhibition offers an assemblage of art and words that explore memory and meaning, happiness and sadness, love and loss, comfort and pain. Featuring the 2020 AFTM Queensland Outsider Art Awards Emerging Award recipients; Anna Jacobson, Liam Boswell, Sophie Callum, Rebecca King and Shirley Gibson, in collaboration with and curated by John Waldron. Together they provide a path to talk and consider the importance of memory and how our memories shape who we are and our perception on life, examining memory and the ability to remember and imagine the future. Artspace Mackay www.artspacemackay.com.au Civic…

ACE Open www.aceopen.art Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8211 7505 Tue to Sat 11am–4pm. As South Australia’s flagship contemporary art gallery, ACE Open presents a year-round program of free exhibitions by practicing South Australian, Australian and international artists. Its exhibitions, talks and events are held at its Lion Arts Centre home in the west end of the city. 14 May—3 July Sidney McMahon: Of Sorrow and Release Sidney McMahon and Sam Petersen. 16 July—4 September Message from the meadow Bridget Currie Art Gallery of South Australia www.agsa.sa.gov.au North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8207 7000 Daily 10am–5pm. Free entry unless specified. 22 May—22 August Ramsay Art Prize Congratulations to Kate Bohunnis, winner of the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize…

Glitterati Robert Rosen Powerhouse Museum: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) 6 August—4 April 2022 A show featuring photographs of rock stars, models, actors and other glamorous people might seem like an odd fit for the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS). But as Glynis Jones, who curated the exhibition Glitterati by photographer Robert Rosen, points out, “We consider this a social history exhibition… We live in a very complex social world and we love building networks and relationships; we have this social curiosity. And part of our socialisation is talking; we love gossiping and consuming images of celebrities and famous people, and people who just look fabulous as well.” And the people Rosen photographed do look both famous and fabulous: from the 1970s onwards he took thousands…

James Street, McClelland Drive, Flinders Lane, Gertrude Street, Sturt Street, Federation Square, Dodds Street, Punt Road, Rokeby Street, Lyttleton Street, Dunns Road, Nicholson Street, Willis Street, Abbotsford Street, Little Malop Street, Tinning Street, Cureton Avenue, Alma Road, Langford Street, Lydiard Street North, Albert Street, Horseshoe Bend, Bourke Street, Whitehorse Road, Vere Street, Barkers Road, Roberts Avenue, Templestowe Road, Church Street ACMI www.acmi.net.au Federation Square, Melbourne, VIC 3000 [Map 2] Mon & Tues 12noon–5pm, Wed to Fri 12noon–7pm Sat 11am–7pm, Sun 11am–6pm. 10 June—1 October head_phone_film_poems Ross Gibson A collection of 13 films that creatively remix material from online archives including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), film material in the National Archives of Australia, crime scene photographs from the Justice and Police Museum Sydney, and Gibson’s own social-media-stored collection of…

Aarwun Gallery www.aarwungallery.com 11 Federation Square, Gold Creek, Nicholls, ACT 2913 [Map 16] 02 6230 2055 Daily 10am–5pm and by appointment in the evening. Old and new works hang side by side on our walls. We represent some of Australia’s finest classical landscape and portrait artists as well as carrying a wide portfolio of stunning contemporary works. Heritage treasures from Norman Lindsay, Pro Hart and David Boyd sit alongside exquisite dot works from the indigenous community. Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery www.anca.net.au 1 Rosevear Place (corner Antill street), Dickson, ACT 2602 [Map 16] 02 6247 8736 Wed to Sun 12noon–5pm. 30 June—18 July Traversed Differences Lisa Myeong-Joo, Natalie Tso, Tanaporn Norsrida, Jana Ortanez, Sineenart Meena (curator). 28 July—15 August Domestic Disturbance Keziah Craven Artists Shed www.artistsshed.com.au 1–3/88 Wollongong Street…

Art Collective WA www.artcollectivewa.com.au 2/565 Hay Street, Cathedral Square, Perth, WA 6000 [Map 19] 08 9325 7237 Wed to Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 12noon–4pm, or by appointment 3 July—31 July Eveline Kotai, Jane Martin and Angela Stewart Bringing together the work of three highly accomplished artists, the works in this exhibition are nostalgic, intuitive and unexpected. Traditional approaches to methodology meld with contemporary elements, sharing glimpses into the everyday through detailed still lifes, chiaroscuro treatments and bold colour and patternation combinations. 21 August—18 September Fennel and Crow Jo Darbyshire New paintings by Jo Darbyshire depict landscapes close to home, explored on solo meanderings during the quietude of lockdown. The work captures the sense of stillness and the heightened perception of the beauty of nature, as well as touching on the sense…

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory www.magnt.net.au 19 Conacher Street, The Gardens, Darwin, NT 0820 08 8999 8264 Open daily 10am–4pm. The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) is the Northern Territory’s premier cultural organisation. 22 May—25 July Container: the box that changed the world In today’s global world you may have had coffee from Brazil or a smoothie containing frozen fruit from China. You could be wearing clothes made in India, watching a TV made in Japan while sitting on a sofa containing wood from Argentina on a laminate floor manufactured in Sweden. All of this has been made possible by a rectangular steel box - the humble shipping container. In this free outdoor exhibition you can literally ‘step inside the box’ to explore…

Message from the meadow Bridget Currie ACE Open 16 July—4 September Bridget Currie is fascinated by meadows. The artist describes the archetypal meadow, characterised by grasses, wildflowers, insects and crawlers, as “a very horizontal space that’s layered and interdependent.” In this humble environment, she explains, “everything has its own ecosystem or niche. It’s intertwined and entangled, and many, many, many organisms form the whole.” Currie contrasts the non-hierarchical space of the meadow to the art-historical idea of ‘figure and ground’, where the landscape is relegated to a backdrop for a human focal point, rather than existing in and of itself. In her exhibition, delivered as the inaugural recipient of ACE Open’s Porter Street Commission, Currie immerses visitors in a slow and attentive space, redolent of the meadow’s intertwined ecology. Organic…

WILAM BIIK TarraWarra Museum of Art 31 July—7 November The complex nature of ‘home’ fascinates First Nations curator Stacie Piper, who has brought together nine contemporary Aboriginal artists to explore connections with Country. Piper’s focus is on work relating to south-east Australia, which takes in about 38 different clans and incorporates, as she describes it, a myriad of “songlines, waterlines and bushlines”. “The first conversations I had about the exhibition were around how we connect to Country and how we see it,” Piper says. “But I also wanted to go into how we hear Country. We have a language word around ‘listening deeply’, but it is about not just listening with your ears, but listening with your eyes and your heart.” Piper says most exhibitions tend to encourage visitors to…

TIARNEY MIEKUS The spiritual, mystical and occult weave throughout your work, particularly in the last 15 years. How did they come into your art? MIKALA DWYER It’s something I have been interested in since I was young, and as I’ve got older it’s developed into a parallel belief, and scepticism. TM You’re compelled by the mystical side of movements like constructivism and Bauhaus, and these spiritual elements were generally seen as inferior—do think that’s because the spiritual is often seen as feminine? MD That’s probably part of it, but I do know in the Bauhaus, when all the mystics got chucked out of the Bauhaus, it was mainly the men being kicked out. I think irrational and more mystical knowledges were not as economically viable, and the more constructivist, architectural…

Recent events in the Australian visual arts have thrown into sharp relief the deeply flawed thinking about the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and communities in contemporary art. These events also demonstrate, even more clearly, the arts-wide issue of the lack of Indigenous arts workers in institutional positions that can foster these conversations, particularly in a structural way. In March 2021, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra was curated into the Dark Mofo program, part of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) winter festival. His intent was to immerse a Union Jack flag into the donated blood of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as a comment on colonialism. The commissioned work, the artist, Dark Mofo and Mona all became the focal point for an unheralded backlash…

Salote Tawale has long seen laughter as more than just a physical reaction. It can signal the presence of tensions that are conveniently hidden from view. The acclaimed artist remembers visiting shopping centres with her Fijian father when she was growing up in Melbourne’s Mount Waverley. A sense of otherness, she says, was a regular experience—and humour was one way to filter this. “Growing up in such an Anglo neighbourhood, I was really aware of my body in space,” says Suva-born Tawale, who has an Anglo-Australian mother and immigrated to Australia as a child. “When my dad walked down the street, people would really stare at us, or make a big effort not to.” She gives a rueful laugh. “I used humour a lot [during] that time. For me, as…

16albermarle www.16albermarle.com 16 Albermarle Street, Newtown, NSW 2042 [Map 7] 02 9550 1517 or 0433 020 237 Thu to Sat 11am–5pm, by appointment only. 10 July—7 August Exhibition #8: Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey Goobalathaldin is the first survey exhibition in Sydney of Lardil painter Dick Roughsey (c1920-1985) from Mornington Island. He was a well known and successful artist from the mid-1960s whose work was a significant connection between Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School from the 1940s and 50s and Papunya Tula Artists from 1971. The exhibition tells the story of his development as artist—beginning as a bark painter, he graduated to acrylic on board after meeting bush pilot and artist Percy Trezise, and accompanied Percy and his friend Ray Crooke on many painting expeditions in FNQ. Realist in style, his…

Bett Gallery www.bettgallery.com.au Level 1, 65 Murray Street, Hobart, 7000, TAS 03 6231 6511 Mon to Fri 10am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 3 July—24 July Painting east from the plateau Richard Wastell 3 July—24 July In (and out of) the Grey Sara Maher 31 July—21 August Fierce Paradise: Paintings from Blairgowrie Imants Tillers 31 July—21 August Waiting for news Locust Jones Colville Gallery www.colvillegallery.com.au 91 Salamanca Place, Hobart TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6224 4088 Daily 10am–5pm. 13 July—2 August Josh Simpson Down Home 3 August—23 August Fluctuations Leanne Halls 31 August—13 September A Duck Billed What? Milan Milojevic Contemporary Art Tasmania www.contemporaryarttasmania.org 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart, TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 0445 Wed to Sun 12noon–5pm. Until 11 July Abolish the Olympics Pony…