Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i Art Guide Australia

MICHAELA BEAR is an emerging writer and curator currently working at RMIT University in Naarm/Melbourne. She was assistant editor for the 2017 Honolulu Biennial and has written for a range of local and international publications including ArtAsiaPacific, The Biennial Foundation website, The Australian, New Zealand Journal of Art and VAULT. ANDY BUTLER is an artist, writer and curator based in Narrm/Melbourne. His arts criticism has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, and frieze. STEVE DOW is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer, whose profiles, essays, previews and reviews range across the visual arts, theatre, film and television for The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Sunday Life, Limelight and VAULT BRIONY DOWNES is an arts writer based in Hobart. She has worked in the…

Beating about the Bush Art Gallery of Ballarat 5 November—19 February 2023 In the 1884 painting A summer morning tiff by Australian Impressionist Tom Roberts, the artist centres the romanticism of a lone female figure (said to be Harriet McCubbin) wearing a corseted white dress and framed by dry, golden-hued bushland. In a contemporary reinterpretation of the painting, Sydney-based photographer Anne Zahalka looks at how clothing speaks of cultural implications. As curator Louise Tegart says, Zahalka “compares the fashion of the 19th century with the garb worn by Islamic women, but also draws on the personal experience of … living between Morocco and Australia.” It’s reinterpretations like these that define Beating about the Bush. Combining historical and contemporary perspectives, Beating about the Bush features over 50 works from the Art…

Lydia Wegner Arc One Gallery 30 November—28 January 2023 The illusory assemblages that Lydia Wegner makes and photographs on her studio tabletop are “quite intimate little constructions”, she says. They’re abstractions made from familiar, everyday materials like paper, dowel and scraps of shiny plastic, but that’s not always easy to tell. “Sometimes when you put the lights on, it can really change what you’re seeing, especially if there are reflective elements.” Wegner’s images are vivid and playful. Creating for over a decade, the Melbourne-based artist uses strong torches and coloured gels to alter shadows and compositions. She disrupts the sense of a clear foreground and background; elements appear to rest or float together, if only for a moment. “I want to find some kind of balance within the frame and…

Tracing Gondwana Midland Junction Arts Centre 19 November—18 February 2023 It’s imperative to contemporary art and life that exhibitions draw attention to our climate crisis—and artists are increasingly addressing the issue in innovative and impassioned ways, like Tracing Gondwana at Midland Junction Arts Centre. Key to the show is a localised focus, as printmaker Nikki Green, one of three artists behind the exhibition, explains. There’s a specific emphasis on “building awareness of current issues in relation to climate change and the cultural and ecological significance of…the southwest of Western Australia”. Tracing Gondwana has been created via a three-way collaboration between Green, fellow printmaker Monika Lukowska and poet Renee Pettitt-Schipp—all of whom draw on backgrounds in environmental art or ecopoetics. The result is a series of works that combine artforms, are…

“Every painting is always two paintings: the one you see, and the one you remember,” says American essayist and novelist SirI Hustvedt. The painting in question for me is Peter Booth’s Painting, 1977—also known as ‘Man with Dog’. I trace back almost 20 years to my 16-year-old self—slouching over a desk in Oberon High School’s photography studio. I am studying a photocopy of Booth’s Painting, 1977, and trying to understand why this depiction of an apocalyptic scene provides me with a sense of comfort. We are being taught visual composition in preparation for exams. I must express what I see in the painting and explain what it means Staring back at me is a masculine figure with vermillion-coloured pupils and a determined resolve. The figure’s ragged grey hair is blown…

Artspace Mackay www.artspacemackay.com.au Civic Precinct, corner Gordon and Macalister Streets, Mackay, QLD 4740 [Map 14] 07 4961 9722 Tue to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat and Sun 10am–3pm. Free entry. 2 September—27 November Tales of the Lyre Bird Curated by Ron McBurnie and Helen Cole, Including artists such as Tate Adams AM, George Baldessin, Anneke Silver, Ray Crooke and Juli Haas. 2 September—20 November The Wall D Harding 27 August—20 November Figuratively Speaking Including paintings by Rosella Namok, Davida Allen and Clara Adolphs. 27 August—20 November Echo Forest—the Eloquence of Trees Veronika Zeil 2 December—19 February 2023 Underground Spandex Ryan Vella 26 November—5 February 2023 Focus on the Collection: Formed Work from the Mackay Regional Art Collection. 26 November—5 February 2023 Too Little, Too Much Niloufar Lovegrove 2 December—5 February 2023 Asia…

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental www.ace.gallery Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8211 7505 Tue to Sat 11am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 12 November—17 December Studios: 2022 Ash Tower, Cecilia Tizard, Shaye Durong, Chelsea Farquhar and Dani Reynolds. Art Gallery of South Australia www.agsa.sa.gov.au Kaurna Country North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8207 7000 Daily 10am–5pm. Free entry. See our website for latest information. 5 November—22 January 2023 Nalini Malani: Gamepieces Don’t miss the first major Australian sur-vey exhibition by pioneering contempo-rary Indian artist Nalini Malani. Spanning five decades, Gamepieces showcases Malani’s radically inventive practice in film, video, photography, large-scale multime-dia installation, painting, and animation. 19 October—8 January 2023 WAVE See Gerry Wedd’s iconic ceramics brought to life a…

People don’t talk enough about friendship in art. Words like ‘collaboration’ and ‘networks’ are used, but rarely friendship—and yet friendship is what has ultimately transpired between Nadia Hernandez and Jon Campbell, our cover artists for this issue. Although they each come from different backgrounds and generations, there is a shared love of words, line and colour, which they speak to in their joint show and in our interview We visit Kate Rohde’s studio where friendship and collaboration merge in her practice, and in our interview with TextaQueen, the artist speaks about their subversive portraits, and the connections they have with sitters—everything from punk mindsets to queer politics. We also have a long-form article on the political nature of portraiture and how artists in Australia are expanding its conservative legacies—it’s a…

Do Ho Suh Museum of Contemporary Art 4 November—26 February 2023 The shifting idea of home—and the word’s concurrent intangibility and pervasiveness—is at the heart of Do Ho Suh’s work. For over three decades, the prolific South Korean artist has explored questions of belonging in his expansive practice, which spans drawing, films, installation, stitching, sculpture—and much more. In the wake of the pandemic and global migration, notions of displacement are even more embedded in the public consciousness: it’s perfect timing for Suh’s first Southern Hemisphere solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). “The work is particularly resonant in the present time, but the kinds of concerns expressed are really universal concerns because they are questions about home and movement and diasporic experience,” says curator Rachel Kent. The survey…

Gamepieces Nalini Malani Art Gallery of South Australia 5 November—22 January 2023 Rhana Devenport, director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, first met artist Nalini Malani in India when Devenport was conducting research for the 1996 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. “Since that time, Nalini and I have done a number of projects together and for me, her work always pushes and pulls between acute beauty and devastating truth.” Tracing Malani’s practice from the 1960s onwards, Devenport has curated Gamepieces—a broad cross section of Malani’s multidisciplinary oeuvre encompassing photography, shadow plays, reverse paintings and installation. Born in 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan, Malani is heavily influenced by her childhood experiences as a refugee of Partition, when British India divided into India and Pakistan, violently displacing 10-20 million people across…

And now, The Plague Teo Treloar Grafton Regional Gallery Until 13 November Teo Treloar Olsen Gallery 30 November—17 December In early 2020, just before Covid-19 hit globally, Teo Treloar went on a research trip to New York to observe 17th-century Dutch etchings. On the journey home, he noticed people had started to mask up. “It was like a Hollywood horror movie,” he says. The previous year, he had read Albert Camus’s The Plague, where an epidemic infects a French Algerian city—“It’s a tough read, it isn’t fun.” Treloar knew the possible trajectory. Shortly after returning to Australia, Treloar’s project evolved to focus on The Plague. He searched for as many different editions of the book as possible and, on receiving them, would create detailed drawings of the covers. The exhibiting…

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), with its distinctive 19th-century colonnaded facade, has undergone several renovations over the past half-century. Now, the doors are opening to Sydney Modern, where this historic building will sit among an expanded art museum campus filled with galleries, libraries and archives. But the centre point of the Sydney Modern project is a new adjacent building—it almost doubles the gallery’s total exhibition space, with original commissions from local artists to international creators. Like when the Queensland Art Gallery added the Gallery of Modern Art in 2006, this new $344 million dollar addition is set to change the Sydney landscape. It started in 2008, when arts patron John Kaldor gifted AGNSW the Kaldor Collection—one of the most significant collections of late 20th-century art in Australia.…

From marble busts and intricately detailed paintings to the humble iPhone selfie, humans have had their likeness depicted in portraits since the form flourished in ancient Egypt over 5,000 years ago. At times, portraiture has been seen from empowering to humbling—but the form also speaks to whose image we value and why. And it’s these urgent aesthetic and social questions that contemporary Australian artists are navigating. During the 14th century, Renaissance Europe was a nucleus for portraiture, often commissioned by wealthy patrons to convey their physical appearance, status, family crests and property assets. Containing visual markers specific to their time, these portraits give us information about life, and how people were living it. Yet this is also a thin slice of life. Once reserved for royalty, the upper classes and…

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. 22 October—19 November Echoes from the Forest Nigel Hewitt Paintings made from ash samples collected from bushfire sites across Tasmania. The tones of the ash vary depending on the vegetation and the differing temperatures of the wild fires. The artist brings these charred organic compounds together to create pictorial, almost photographic, tributes to landscape. They are a plea for action. A call from the forest, awaiting a response. 22 October—19 November Portraits of the Dead Rebecca Dagnall A contemplative look at the notion of Solastalgia, coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, and defined as, ‘the lived experience of negative environmental change’, akin to ‘the…

Melbourne Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse National Gallery of Victoria 11 December—16 April 2023 In June 1996 the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) began collecting work by fashion designer Alexander McQueen. This was the early days of McQueen’s prolific career: he was yet to be awarded Designer of the Year in 1996 and 1997 by the British Fashion Council, and unexpectedly succeed John Galliano as head designer at Givenchy. Until McQueen’s untimely death in 2010, the NGV amassed one of the most significant collections of the designer’s work—which is now being revealed. It wasn’t just McQueen’s working-class background and unconventional entry into the fashion world that disturbed critics. It was his unapologetic response to the polarising reactions his theatrical and subversive runway shows caused. McQueen appeared unfazed by the controversy.…

Bruce Thurrowgood Handmark Gallery 18 November—5 December To live in the isolated town of Bicheno, on the east coast of Tasmania, is to have a profound relationship with water. For the painter Bruce Thurrowgood, a resident of this settlement that faces toward the Tasman Sea, his relationship with water is aesthetic—perhaps transcendent. “The paintings have all developed from the observation of light on water where I live,” says Thurrowgood of his new exhibition at Handmark, which features 20 paintings of various sizes, all acrylic on linen. “New paintings from 2021 reflect states of water with multiple layers of patterning in the sand and the surface of the water,” explains the artist. “The 2022 paintings are more concentrated on the picture plane and relationships between gradual colours, tones, patterns and layering.…

NURA: Deep Listening Cement Fondu 15 October—10 December The practice of deep listening is at the foundation of the exhibition NURA—which is also the Dharawal word for Country. Through sound and sculpture, Indigenous artists salllvage (AKA Rowan Savage) and Maddison Gibbs are creating a new engagement with their communities. For NURA, both artists connected with Dharug Elder Aunty Julie Webb for knowledge sharing workshops, which guided the development of their works. “Both Rowan and Maddie, in their own practices, talk about their connection to Country, but also about the political history and memories and language that has been lost, hidden or removed,” says curator Dennis Golding. Kombumerri artist salllvage’s work is a multi-sound source installation, blending natural field recordings with distorted compositions. The result is an immersive soundscape that shows…

<y<s To Hands Tim Price Penny Contemporary 11 November—2 December When approaching painting, Tim Price begins with drawing—scores of drawings. Price fills whole sketch books, detailing images and visual references from memory and close observation. He likens this approach to a ‘living process’, something he can do amid the busyness of daily demands. It’s economical too—Price can experiment before applying paint to canvas. After the pages of one book are exhausted, he’ll start filling up another. Only a few drawings will ever become paintings, like those showing at Penny Contemporary. The artist paints when he’s most relaxed—or if that’s not possible, at least the act of painting will allow him a feeling of calmness, enhancing creativity. The titles of Price’s expressive paintings read like a stream of consciousness, arguably mimicking…

GISELLE AU-NHIEN NGUYEN You’ve worked across forms from photography to marker drawings. How has your practice evolved over time? TEXTAQUEEN In my fine arts degree, I mostly did photography and experimental video, but then I left and I didn’t have a $40,000 edit suite or a dark room, so I started drawing as my main practice. I’ve always done photography, just not as part of my exhibiting practice—I could not be an artist if the only thing I was doing was making giant works on paper for commercial and institutional spaces, because a big part of my art process (and why I want to be making art) is for the connections with people. Not only in the process, but also in who sees the work, and those kind of white…

Describe your practice in seven words? Visually diagramming the depth of protective coverings. Your first art love? Yayoi Kusama, for her pataphysical universes and love of infinity. When I first encountered her work in the 90s, I didn’t understand the nuance or breadth of her practice. I was initially interested in the psychedelic mapping of self, space, and the collective, in relation to her unique polka dot camouflage. But the political dimension of her Happenings and her presence in the 1960s New York City art scene means a lot to me now. I never thought I would actually get to see her work in-person, as I grew up in regional Queensland with no contemporary art until I travelled at age 15. So I cried when I encountered a mirror room…

Nathan Beard has long been wise to rituals, both strange and familiar, that create a sense of home. As a boy growing up in 90s Perth, his mother, who immigrated from Thailand, nurtured tropical plants in their suburban garden. He remembers shrines in the house, and time spent with women in the Thai community. His upbringing, he says, felt ordinary. “My mum’s garden was different—in the back of our house there would be banana palms, a portrait, herbs,” Beard says. “She had a really green thumb, but it was all about growing stuff we could use in the kitchen and that was before there were pots of coriander at Coles. What I had felt commonplace. But if I went to white schoolfriends’ houses, I [noticed] things like people not taking…

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art www.4a.com.au 181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket, Warrane/Sydney, NSW 2000 [Map 12] 02 9212 0380 See our website for latest information. 22 October—18 December TextaQueen: Bollywouldn’t Bollywouldn’t is a catchphrase decolonised; it is an imagining of utopia and reclamation of power. Bollywouldn’t deconstructs all the “-isms” in the Bollywood genre, giving agency back to South Asians, particularly those marginalised within our cultures through sexuality and gender identities. Working predominantly in felt-tip pen—aka ‘texta’—TextaQueen positions Bollywouldn’t as a balm to diasporic displacement. 16albermarle www.16albermarle.com 16 Albermarle Street, Newtown, NSW 2042 [Map 7] 02 9550 1517 or 0433 020 237 Thu to Sat 11am–5pm, or by appointment. See our website for latest information. 19 November—17 December 16albermarle Revisited An exhibition featuring highlights from our first 11 exhibitions. Including…

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. 28 October—19 November Up Early David Keeling 25 November—17 December Low to no filter Mish Meijers 25 November—17 December Shadow Moves Annika Koops Contemporary Art Tasmania www.contemporaryarttasmania.org 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 0445 Wed to Sun, noon–5pm. See our website for latest information. 19 November—11 December CAT Annual Members’ Exhibition Colville Gallery www.colvillegallery.com.au 15 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, TAS 7004 [Map 17] 03 6224 4088 Daily 10am–5pm. See our website for latest information. Colville Gallery is a Hobart based gallery specializing in Contemporary and Modern Fine Art. The Gallery presents works by contemporary Tasmanian and Australian artists featuring paintings, works on paper, photography and…

1 Ararat Gallery TAMA 2 Art Gallery of Ballarat 3 Arts Space Wodonga 4 The Art Vault 5 Benalla Art Gallery 6 Bendigo Art Gallery 7 Black Gallery 8 Boom Gallery 9 Castlemaine Art Gallery 10 Central Goldfields Art Gallery 11 The Distorted Frame 12 East Gippsland Art Gallery 13 Everywhen Artspace 14 The Foundry Arts Space 15 Geelong Art Space 16 Geelong Gallery 17 Gippsland Art Gallery 18 Hamilton Art Gallery 19 Horsham Regional Gallery 20 Latrobe Regional Gallery 21 La Trobe Art Institute 22 Maffra Exhibition Space 23 Mildura Arts Centre 24 National Wool Museum 25 QDOS Art Gallery 26 Queenscliff Gallery 27 Post Off ice Gallery Art Academy 28 Red Tree Gallery 29 Rutherglen Art Gallery 30 Salt Contemporary Art 31 Shepparton Art Museum 32 Silver Leaf…