Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 69 i Artist Profile

I use kupesi as a visual language for representing sound, through graphic notation of fangufangu melodies, which I created from Tongan bird songs In the final weeks of her PhD thesis deadline, Adriana is generous with her time and her words. She speaks fluently about her interdisciplinary practice, which is motivated by aims of decolonisation, Indigenous self-determination, and social justice across Moana Oceania (the Pacific). Interested in the intersection of sound and visuals as equal conduits of meaning and experience, Adriana uses her body at the centre of this exchange. You take an embodied, decolonial approach to issues of gender, sexuality, and identity. In your own life, where does this focus stem from? As a Tongan-Australian queer / leitī woman, issues of intersectional feminism and queer Moana Oceanian representation are…

Almost musical, his bright, dynamic harmonies appear animated by the spirits of their subjects, but these are complex spirits. Yuriyal is not simply a witness to beauty; he is often immersed in contrasts, if not contradictions, playing with notions of stillness and movement, unity and division, conflict and protection, community and the individual in the background. Of course, many of the roots of Bridgeman’s approach come from his own background—some elements are ancestral, which he recalls and reinvents. En masse, all these harmonies can create a cacophony. When hung together, tightly stacked, they recall Yuriyal’s interest in rugby, or more specifically, the vibrant colours and designs of rugby uniforms colliding in a scrum. It’s hard to overlook that Yuriyal’s life as an artist was shaped even before he came into…

Sara Maher was the first artist I met in Tasmania. I encountered Maher gently arranging tiny drawings and prints in a tree for the 2004 Mountain Festival Sculpture Trail. It was a generous work, and despite its public location, deeply personal. The illustrations stemmed from an intuitive “drawing and writing process” that Maher and her sister continue to this day. To the artist, the work embodied “a magical connection . . . a sisterly connection.” Maher takes inspiration from the local natural environment and cultural history, but her work is far from representational. Maher embraces chance, intuition, and natural processes in the making of her prints, paintings, and drawings. The ghost-like image in Thinking in my Ancestor’s Shadow, 2021, for instance, formed naturally in response to the surface qualities of…

“She is after all not a nature photographer but the photographer of a predicament . . .” Douglas Kahn, Photofile, 1995 I am listening to Rosemary Laing play on the Steinway piano in the Boyd family sitting room at Bundanon where she was in residence. She recorded herself playing as an accompaniment to her otherwise silent isolation, while severe flooding held her captive and transformed the work she was in the middle of producing from one thing into another. You can hear the rain like a second soundtrack to her elegiac Piano Music. Her composition and performance are very confident for someone without any musical background. Born in Brisbane, Rosemary Laing trained as a painter, subsequently studying photography in Tasmania and Sydney. Her early work interrogated the margins of perception…

Eye Lash Horizon is the first solo exhibition by Sarah Contos in a major public institution. Occupying the full ground floor of UNSW Galleries, Contos has spent a year preparing four rooms of installations, each named for an anatomical or metaphysical theme—Brain; Womb; Belly; Soul—and each with its own distinct character, materials, and influences from popular culture. Though comprised entirely of new work completed in 2023 and 2024, Eye Lash Horizon is presented as a thematic survey of two decades of Contos’ practice—a distillation and continuation of longstanding conceptual and material interests. You enter Eye Lash Horizon by way of the Womb. Inside, the walls are clad in black plastic, enveloping you along with the room’s only work: a large, three-channel video installation, MoTH-eRR, 2023. A loose narrative of metamorphosis…

In 2022, dual survey shows by Khaled Sabsabi were presented, with Campbelltown Arts Centre hosting Khaled Sabsabi: A Hope and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, staging Khaled Sabsabi: A Promise. These messages gave voice to Sabsabi from the west, where he lives, to the east of the city where he found refuge—a hope and a promise. This poetic sentiment has been explored further in his new survey exhibition spanning eighteen years at The Lock-Up (TLU), Newcastle, with the eponymous title Khaled Sabsabi. Sabsabi’s name has been gaining momentum, with recent achievements including the Creative Australia Award for Visual Arts 2023, “acknowledging Australian artists who have made an outstanding and sustained contribution to their art form and the cultural life of the nation;” the monograph Khaled Sabsabi by Bandicoot Publishing,…

In Artist Profile’s sixty-ninth issue there are many articles that delve into the artists’ nature, their understanding of materials, but mostly their courage to reveal the uneven. There is continuing interest in our essays and reviews which support new critiques on current visual arts exhibitions. An outstanding essay by Alan Cruickshank is concerned with the future of the Biennale of Sydney, deriving from the feeling that a significant proportion of the visual arts community believes that art scholarship is being undermined by activism. Ron Robertson-Swann is this issue’s cover artist. His influence on Australian painting and sculpture is deep and impressive. After teaching and exhibiting in the United Kingdom in his twenties and early thirties, Robertson-Swann accepted Gough Whitlam’s invitation in 1973 to be an inaugural member of the Australia…

Ron Robertson-Swann OAM turned eighty-three this year. That makes well over sixty active—and continuing—years as one of the leading sculptors and painters of his generation. Public interest in his work has waxed and waned and waxed again with changes in fashion. His best-known public art commission, Vault, was unveiled in Melbourne in 1980 and moved multiple times after protests from the critical establishment. The sculpture has now been elevated by Heritage Victoria, no less, to the status of “state-level cultural heritage significance;” its angular yellow influence can be seen across the city on everything from street furniture to t-shirts. Throughout his career, his uncompromising dedication to traditions of practice has never wavered. Robertson-Swann has devoted his life to “putting things in the right relations to other things”—in two and three…

Namedropping does not mean anything if you do not recognise the reference. It means nothing. Yes, of course, you could look it up if you wanted to. Or be educated by the app that tells you how to look at the works. But I did not. I just looked and hoped I’d get overwhelmed and be in awe. I did read about the works later in the exhibition catalogue. If I had been curating the exhibition I would have gone with the title Things We Like. Because then I would not have been expecting to see such a seemingly random selection of ad hoc artefacts, ephemera, and memorabilia. Yet there I was looking at it and I was curious. When I am at someone’s house, I like looking at the…

Technically adventurous and not anchored in a particular narrow “signature style,” Hanning emerges from this exhibition that covers forty years of his work as primarily a storyteller—albeit he tells stories that frequently lack a linear narrative. What is apparent in this exhibition is that Hanning is very much a Gippsland product; born, raised, and still living in Gippsland. He was born in Traralgon in 1950; started his training at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education; and at the age of twenty two, became the youngest director of the Latrobe Valley Arts Centre (later renamed Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell), a post that he held for almost a decade. In 1967, he became a shire councillor and later mayor of Latrobe City. Despite spells of living and working in America and being…

I first met Reg Mombassa when he was Chris O’Doherty at art school in the 1970s. In those days students in the painting studios were each allocated a six-foot square, marked out on the floor in masking tape. One evening Chris constructed his space as a six-foot-square paper-walled gallery to exhibit a series of his tiny paintings and writing. I seem to recall he’d invited sixty people to the opening. It was a very memorable and Mombassian event. Introducing this revised 2024 edition of The Landscapes of Reg Mombassa, Reg explains with a characteristically wry twist, that Hypersonic Realism is a new art movement relating to “the extremely high-speed landscape drawings that I create in moving cars. Hypersonic missiles travel faster than the speed of sound and this explains why,…

Discovering art at the age of eight in a HarperCollins book, which belonged to friends of his parents, opened Russell Storer’s eyes to a new world markedly different to Western Australia’s remote Wheatbelt where he was growing up. Of the art history book’s impact, Storer recalls “I was completely transfixed; it was a portal into another world I didn’t know existed or had access to.” From then on, his interest in art developed, “It was something I was always really drawn to,” Storer states. Upon graduating from high school and unfamiliar with possible art career paths, Storer undertook studies in fine art in Perth. After realising quickly that he was not an artist, he applied and was accepted into the bachelor of art history and theory degree at UNSW Art…

( SC)OOT(ER)ING around is a testament to the decades-long careers of Su san Cohn and Eugenia Raskopoulos. The exhibition was born from discussions between the artists and curator Victoria Lynn about the rights of women and diverse peoples and the shaping of identity. As a retrospective, it substantiates Lynn’s close working relationship with the artists with whom she co-devised a selection of artworks from the 1990s to now. It further indicates the power of TarraWarra Museum to facilitate collaborations between like-minded artists to create new art. (SC)OOT(ER)ING around makes full use of TarraWarra Museum’s impressive and expansive gallery spaces. The exhibition introduces audiences to the artists’ earlier and recent art, interspersed with collaborative installations. Among the twenty artworks displayed, those that address specific emotive and ethical concerns are particularly captivating.…

Dark and alive with momentum and verve, there is something extraordinarily immediate in Godwin’s play across the picture plane. Channelling the eighteenth century master of the still life, Jean Siméon Chardin, with tightly stepped horizontals that give incremental and fine depth, the foreground is abundantly realised as a world of amassed objects, furniture, clutter, art, and space. And then come the verticals, with large window-like voids of dark, scratch-framed tempera. These veil-like tempera washes add ambiguity and form to the reading of the painting, allowing the artist to be simultaneously present and absent, while bestowing an ethereal or romantic quality to the work. The windows, doors, and walls that read as voids repeat throughout the exhibition, with many of the paintings centred by a large rectangular abyss where, strangely, the…

Since its inception in 2001, the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize has gained its reputation in attracting a high calibre of sculptors, each vying for the coveted $25,000 prize money. This year’s entries are no exception. In a strong field, the prize was awarded to the smallest and most inconspicuous sculpture shortlisted, #19, from the series Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing, 2024, by the sculptor Hannah Gartside. The sculpture is comprised of found leather gloves, wire, cotton fabric, and sewing thread. #19 distilled a quiet subtlety among the blitz, hype, and larger size of the other contenders in this year’s entries that simply could not be ignored. In response to winning the award, Gartside said, ". . . well this sculpture showed me what I needed: aloneness, rest, introspection, and…

Daaaaaalí! is directed by the electronic musician and DJ turned director, Quentin Dupieux, who established a deserved cult following with his 2010 film, Rubber. For those unfamiliar with Dupieux’s filmography, Rubber is about a sentient tire that has telekinetic powers and develops a penchant for exploding heads. While not his first film, Rubber left its mark—if one excuses the word play—splattering the way for even stranger films to follow. Another notable work is his 2019 film Deerskin about a man besotted with his deerskin jacket who proves his fidelity by destroying other jackets. In comparison, the still-very-odd Daaaaaalí! seems mild and restrained. What is so strange about the film is that it is not even weirder, not more excessive given its material and simultaneously arty but schlocky auteur [a filmmaker…