The ecology of Rachel Theodorakis

/

‘Journeys’ at Grainger Gallery, Canberra, features Sally Simpson and Rachel Theodorakis, whose works resonate with bones, mortality, time and thread. ‘Journeys’ is an early commercial show for Theodorakis, who graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design in 2017, and also serves as a survey of her practice to date, with fresh presentations of key works intermingling with new series. 

For Theodorakis, tradition proves mutable and expansive. Meditative hand skills learnt from her mother and grandmother are used to graft silk flowers to animal skulls and spines. The art of basket weaving has been refined to encase large curving bones of cows and the finely articulated remains of kangaroos. In this way, the Roman god of beginnings, endings and transitions has become Januss – Goddess of Transitions (2021), embodied by two ram skulls, the forward facing of which is resplendent in a headdress of silk roses. In Transference (2017), a large jawbone is partially clothed in black weaving that suspends a second bone, whose uppermost reaches are similarly covered. Each is vulnerable: the giving, supporting jawbone is being drained; the receiving bone is utterly dependent and unprotected against the time when the jawbone lets go.

Very recent works focus on relationships and wellbeing. The unabashed and unsentimental ‘Nurture’ series of 2021 is a compelling statement of the importance of the parent-child relationship. Each sculpture comprises two resonant forms: a cow bone encased in thick weaving shelters or supports a smaller similarly shaped kangaroo bone covered in finely woven thread. In contrast to Transference, the effect is of connected independence.

In Twentytwenty (2021), the individual bones of a kangaroo tail are each encased in two layers of weaving before being drawn into a gentle encircling darkness. As Theodorakis explained in her artist statement: ‘We live in a society that fears darkness and it causes great distress. I wish to share a different viewpoint … The darkness is a place of nourishment. It offers respite, somewhere to reflect, to gain new knowledge and grow strong again.’

Faced by a world of upheaval and the increasingly oppressive reality of our climate crisis, Theodorakis’s work issues a personal invitation to change. Her careful material transformations suggest that successful transitions are conscious and painstaking as well as intuitive and hopeful leaps of faith. In ‘Journeys’, her work helps guide our philosophical focus – to the darkness for the benefits that can be found there, and to each other.

Margaret Farmer, Canberra

‘Journeys: Sally Simpson and Rachel Theodorakis’ is on view at Grainger Gallery, Canberra, until 20 March 2022.

On home turf: Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty at Tweed

/

What with lockdowns and gallery closures, the pandemic has brought about many changes in art practice. Interestingly, it is the established genre of still life where this can be seen most clearly.

At the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, the exhibition ‘At Home’, which exhibits still-life paintings by Ben Quilty (born 1973) together with those by his friend and mentor Margaret Olley (1923–2011), we witness the changing relationships to objects, pictorial objectives and techniques which have occurred over a generation.

As a young artist, Olley’s primary focus was landscape. Not owning a car, the convenience of a still life set up in her house gradually became her chosen subject matter – either in the form of an interior or a focused arrangement on a table. Her works are considered and sensual, with the carefully placed objects, flowers and fruit capturing light and the rhythm of space. Colour and scale are naturalistic and the order rational.

For those familiar with Quilty’s work dealing with expressions of humanity, such as compassion, anger and empathy, the return to still life may seem surprising, but it has been a constant within his oeuvre following on from his ‘Torana’, ‘Skull’ and ‘Budgie’ series of the 2000s. When COVID brought about the need for Quilty’s son Joe to homeschool in his father’s studio, Quilty decided not to work on violent emotional paintings, but to turn to the more meditative still life which he had always enjoyed.

Quilty’s work does not propose still life as a closely cropped and focused arrangement on a table, nor does he suggest an exercise in formal deconstruction. His still-life painting is more about translating a universe of feeling inspired by the natural world through the sensations of sight and touch into a sensuous combination of colour and light. It is only to be expected that his subject matter would reveal a generational difference, and Quilty’s works Multi Vitamins and Surface Spray and Locked down (both 2020) are clearly related to the pandemic.

Olley once told me that a teacher had accused her of having greedy eyes, and greedy eyes she had in the interior Chinese screen and yellow room (1996), where the work not only takes in the many objects in the room but flows into the adjacent blue kitchen. In Ranunculus and pears (2004), it is hard to imagine where one more object could fit as she masterfully handles both objects and space.

By contrast, Quilty’s Christopher’s Cobra Lily morphs into a tangle of surface shapes suggestive of its subject’s insect-eating powers, while Silence, Tone’s Waratah (also 2020) has a deeply poetic simplicity.

Curator Ingrid Hedgcock has provided an interesting connection between the two artists by including a work by 15-year-old Olley and one by 18-year-old Quilty, each of which could have been executed by the other.

Olley’s home is on permanent exhibition at the Tweed, and the inclusion of the paint-laden table and Victorian chair from Quilty’s studio gives some idea of his working space alongside Mim Stirling’s and Steven Alderton’s photographs of the Quilty and Olley studios respectively. Their unique interconnection through art is established with the inclusion of Quilty’s Elwood Park (2002) to which Olley awarded that year’s Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, and Quilty’s portrait of Olley which won the 2011 Archibald Prize.

Within the gallery spaces, audiences are encouraged to create their own still life as well as an online challenge on Facebook and Instagram. It is an exhibition which has a lot to give and a lot to think about.

Christine France, Murwillumbah

‘At Home: Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty’ is on display at Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, Murwillumbah, until 20 February 2022. As the Co-executor of Margaret Olley’s estate, the author worked closely with Tweed Regional Gallery to open the Margaret Olley Art Centre in 2014.

Into the warren: White Rabbit’s microcosm of contemporary China

/

Philanthropist Judith Neilson opened the White Rabbit Gallery 13 years ago, with 500 works in her collection of contemporary (which she defines as post-2000) Chinese art. Since then, the gallery has grown from an ambitious private project to make a once largely unknown section of art history into one of Sydney’s destination galleries, and the collection itself has now expanded to almost 3000 works.

White Rabbit Gallery reopened to the public in December last year after Sydney’s four-month lockdown with a bang. Titled ‘Big in China’, the exhibition explores the very definition of White Rabbit’s aspirations as both a collection, institution and gallery space.

‘What does it mean to make it big in China?’ curator David Williams asks. According to critic Pi Li (writing in the 2010 book The Big Bang: Contemporary Chinese Art from the White Rabbit Collection), in the space of just 30 years, Chinese artists have gone from underground dissidents to global quasi-celebrities. Today, for a contemporary Chinese artist to make it big in China, talent alone is no longer enough. Rather, the grand narratives of China, the oldest extant civilisation on the planet, and the unique creativity of its leading artists combine to move the nation. Williams takes on a new approach to answer his own question, this time using the overarching idea of global celebrity to tie the works together instead of his usual thematic approach.

‘Big in China’ features the works of 11 artists spread out among the gallery’s four floors. At the entrance, a tunnel invites visitors to participate in an 8-bit video game, where they play as a communist soldier armed with Coca-Cola grenades on a mission to reach the moon – this is Feng Mengbo’s Long March – Restart (2008), a commentary on the scars that the Cultural Revolution has left on contemporary China. Upstairs, Lin Yan’s Sky 2 (2016) leads visitors through a peaceful maze constructed of countless layers of dyed xuan, alluding to the ancient yet enduring Chinese tradition of ink on rice paper.

The second floor is dominated by Xu Zhen’s Hello (2018–19), the robotic serpentine Corinthian column that writhes and twists to greet the audience, most recently displayed at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Finally, the top floor opens to Tang Nannan’s video Faith Mountain (2015) projected on the walls of a circular room. Compared to the video work at the entrance, there is an overwhelming sense of quiet here – viewers are invited to sit in the darkness on cushions and gaze into the infinite and undulating landscape before them.

The ascension from the ground to the third floor becomes a journey in itself – the progression from sensory overload to subversive art histories to pure peace brings insight to how contemporary Chinese artists animate an entire nation in unison. ‘Big in China’ brings out the gems of Neilson’s private collection, leading audiences to reach their own conclusions about what it really takes to succeed in China’s competitive and flourishing art scene.

In a sense, however, this exhibition reads like a series of collection highlights: a microcosmic retrospective gaze into the strongest works the gallery has displayed since 2009. It feels like a finale of sorts: a resolute deep dive that ties the gallery’s past 23 exhibitions together. Perhaps this signals a renaissance for the collection, as a statement that there is a new vision emerging. Or perhaps this is purely a milestone set in place by White Rabbit to mark a point in time in the continuously evolving cultural landscape that is contemporary China.

Zeta Xu, Sydney

Curated by David Williams, ‘Big in China’ is at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, until 22 May 2022. Zeta Xu was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Continuities and change: 'Doing Feminism' by Anne Marsh

/

This invaluable compendium by art historian Anne Marsh provides a comprehensive overview of feminism and Australian art from the 1970s to the present. The work examined includes performance art, photography, sculpture, painting and printmaking, and is organised by decade, although there is some crossover where the material demands comparison or linkage. In Part One, Marsh catalogues works alongside excerpts from key texts of the period, which are reproduced in more detail in Part Two. This structural division proves very effective, as it allows the artworks to be in conversation with each other, permitting unimpeded visual comparison and juxtaposition.

Marsh does not treat feminism as a taken-for-granted concept or a unified movement. Rather, she succinctly traces its various threads and its relationships with both art and social change in Australia more broadly, such as the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, as well as the ongoing struggle for self-determination by our First Nations people. Although she catalogues the art by decade, she also notes that this is a somewhat arbitrary marker, arguing that the ‘feminism of the 1970s needs to be considered as part of a long decade that starts somewhere in the mid to late 1960s in Australia’.

Marsh also uses the concept of feminism as an organising principle in a manner that is expansive and generous, rather than reductive or exclusive. This achievement is underpinned, as the book’s title suggests, by focusing on action undertaken in the name of feminism, rather than the use of feminism as a designation of personal identity. In line with this approach, Marsh also includes craft in her discussion, linking it back to grassroots consciousness-raising practices. A key example is ‘craftvism’, which is used by the Knitting Nannas ‘as an anchoring point for political activism in their persistent campaigns against the mining of coal seam gas in Australia’.

Marsh identifies key international influences, such as the lecture tour undertaken by Lucy Lippard in 1975, and also Laura Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on postcolonial feminism, but balances these against homegrown influences and collectives. She is also attentive to the ways in which knowledge formation occurs, highlighting the institutionalisation of particular works in the art history curriculum, such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), and the ongoing work of challenging the canon. Marsh notes the work carried out in the last decade to contextualise the contribution of Indigenous artists to the contemporary art movement, acknowledging that in the 1970s, although the ‘nascent avant-garde in painting was emerging from the Western Desert as Indigenous artists started to enter the contemporary art scene … it was inconceivable to the white art world … that Indigenous art would take centre stage in the next decades’.

Doing Feminism is a vital record of how feminists have sought to remake the world through art, and renders visible both the continuities and the changes.

Amy Walters

Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia by Anne Marsh: Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2021, 532 pages, AU$199.99; Amy Walters was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Titular puns and Freudian slips: Sarah Lucas at the NGA

/

The National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is billed as the first major solo exhibition of Lucas’s work in this country. Featuring new sculptures from both her ongoing ‘Bunny’ series and a more recent series cast in bronze (from which the gallery last year purchased TITTIPUSSIDAD, 2018), the installation sits prominently alongside and concurrent with the ‘Know My Name’ exhibition of Australian women artists.

Although she rose to notoriety as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement of the late 1980s, Lucas’s name has arguably not retained the celebrity status that other YBAs such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst still enjoy. Her work, however, continues to draw on the practices that the YBAs group used to shock the art establishment at its inception in its use of everyday objects and crude representations of sexual and other bodily processes. Her photographic self-portrait from 1990, which depicts Lucas eating a banana, is emblematic of her confrontational style. Reproduced in giant black-and-white prints on the walls of the exhibition space, it also presents Lucas in an androgynous light, a theme that recurs in her sculptures.

The first time you are in a room with Lucas’s work, it is hard to know what to make of it, and ‘Project 1’ is no exception. Surrounded by pendulous breasts and huge penises, at first glance the installation seems to be an uncanny manifestation of a stereotypical patriarchal fantasy in which women are impossibly proportioned and the phallus rules. At the same time, a disarming playful quality is also evident in Lucas’s use of visual puns and titular jokes. The figure PEEPING THOMASINA (2020) is a key example: while her name references the stereotypical male voyeur, the figure is looking at the viewer while revealing her own genitalia.

The ‘Bunny’ series originated in 1997 and references the Playboy magazine logo. Principally constructed from nylon stockings, their pliable forms echo the soft sculptures of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Their most striking features are their lanky contorted limbs and prominent breasts. As the figures are headless, the breasts meet the viewer’s eye, a tactic that draws attention to the male gaze by explicitly tracking it. Each figure is lit from above, as though they are performing on stage, an association that is enhanced by the stripper heels adorning some of the figures’ feet. While this arrangement echoes the patriarchal construction of the female body as public property, Lucas subverts this association through her figures’ implied agency. OOPS! (2019) features a figure straddling a chair in a manner reminiscent of the iconic photograph of Christine Keeler taken by Lewis Morley in 1963. In her later years, Keeler revealed that she was reluctant to appear nude, and that the pose had been selected to hide her nakedness. In Lucas’s rendition, it seems that the figure is choosing to reveal her nudity, and that this is the transgression.

DORA LALALA (2020) strikes an almost-childlike pose, as though the figure is awkwardly revealing her sexual self while in a kind of dream state. This is possibly an homage to Freud, whom Lucas admires (one of his case studies was about a woman he named Dora). Her sculptures parallel Freud’s psychoanalytic work; the unremitting focus on crude sexuality could be interpreted as reductive, but, on another level, it brings to the fore archetypes that are deeply embedded within our culture.

Since 2007, Lucas has lived in a farmhouse in rural Suffolk, where, surrounded by ancient churches and the relics of agrarian life, her access to a deeper time structure has become possible. This, in turn, has led to a revitalisation of the mythic in her work, an idea encapsulated in her bronze sculpture ELF WARRIOR (2018). Her use of bronze connotes glory and domination, especially when contrasted with the pliability of the ‘Bunny’ stockings, but the show of strength collectively implied by these figures is undercut by both the absurd size of their phallic elements and their latent androgyny – a final reminder that nothing with Lucas is ever settled.

Amy Walters, Canberra

Curated by Peter Johnson, ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until 18 April 2022, and can also be viewed online. Amy Walters was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Mapping Croft’s voyages and traces of Country at CMAG

/

Brenda L. Croft’s current multimedia exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG), ‘hand/made/held/ground’, traces the artist’s continuing connection to Country through an insightful exploration of her patrilineal heritage and Indigenous epistemologies.  

Dispersed across the floor and the walls of the gallery are a multitude of palm-sized glass casts of kurrwa (stone axes) and jimpila (stone spearheads), customary objects originating from Gurindji Country. Reminiscent of constellations in the night sky, the translucent objects sit atop steel bases that periodically shine with coloured lights. In the dimly lit space, the captivating work is connected by wires that have been organised organically, creating interlinking paths reflecting on Croft’s personal journey as a descendant of a Stolen Generations’ member. Another form of tracing surrounds the installation with photographs of satellite images of Country. This body of work physically maps out Croft’s voyages, many of which were accompanied by family and Gurindji community members, in the style of GPS navigation routes.

Displayed in conjunction with the exhibition is Croft’s 2018 ‘Made in Australia II’ series. Drawn from the CMAG collection, the eight large-scale photographs are reproductions of Kodachrome slides taken in the 1950s and 1960s by the artist’s mother, Dorothy Jean Croft, an Anglo-Australian woman. The enlarged images reveal Dorothy’s handwritten notes alongside the ‘Made in Australia’ manufacturing imprint of each slide, a pairing evocative of the nation’s changing postwar demographic. 

By re-examining material objects in diverse and engaging ways, ‘hand/made/held/ground’ presents an auto-ethnographical investigation of Croft’s relationship to both her patrilineal and matrilineal lineages, providing an artistic roadmap for the future. 

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Canberra

‘hand/made/held/ground’ is currently on display at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until 22 January 2022.

Satiating artists and audiences: ‘SIMMER’ at MAMA

/

The verb simmer describes a liquid substance bubbling gently, just below boiling point. The Oxford English Dictionary also defines simmer as ‘to be in a state of subdued or suppressed activity’. Collectively, we simmered away during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns: trapped inside, cut off from family and friends, worlds reduced to the interior of our respective homes. When we were finally freed, joy bubbled to the surface. We gathered around picnic rugs, sharing food and drink in a burst of frenzied activity. ‘SIMMER’ at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) embodies these sentiments. According to its website, the exhibition aspires to consider ‘how food can bring us together, break down barriers and open us up to new experiences’. This is a well-rehearsed line of enquiry in studies of food-related artwork. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud applied the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe practices emergent in the 1990s that reintegrated social contact into art encounters. Bourriaud theorised that such work could repair social bonds weakened through feelings of alienation or isolation. Following a period of fractured social relations from the enforced separation caused by the pandemic, ‘SIMMER’ similarly addresses the ways food can engender kinship and bonding.  

Many of the artworks selected by curator Nanette Orly explore the cultural significance and social relations implicit in preparing and sharing foodstuffs. Singaporean-Australian artist Nabilah Nordin’s installation Domestic Dough Facility (2021) involves sculpted dough mixers and conveyor belts devoid of their functionality alongside an assortment of oddly shaped, rock-hard bread. The latter is a highly symbolic foodstuff; we say to ‘break bread’ to describe kinship practices involving food. American artist Eva Aguila’s Comida a Mano (2019) frames tortillas as a tangible link to her Mexican heritage, and British artist Navi Kaur’s Mērā Ghar (2021) involves deeply personal familial rituals linked to food, culture and faith. Both films consider how food production and consumption can serve as a method to maintain social and cultural ties, especially for individuals who resettle in a new country.  

Australian artist E. J. Son’s T tree (2021), an assemblage of fleshy nipples, abstracts the forms of capsicums and tomatoes to appear like the soft petals of a flower. Son casts the produce’s rounded ends in flesh-toned silicone and inserts a replica of a human nipple in the middle. Son’s titillating tree entwines the ripened reproductive organs of flowers (or fruits) with a part of the female anatomy that is both sexualised and a source of nourishment for infants. The work speaks to our earliest experience combining eating and social interaction – breastfeeding – an act of care that forms social bonds between child and mother. 

‘SIMMER’ offers audiences a global survey of food-based customs and presents a veritable feast to a travel-starved population. It relates to a seemingly similar show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, ‘The Way We Eat’, a display drawn mainly from the museum’s Asian art collection that explores food consumption by way of vessels, tableware and banquet scenes. As we start to reconnect with our family and friends, MAMA’s exhibition reminds us of the role foodstuffs play across cultures in cementing social bonds and in bringing into sensorial focus the essential relationship between artist and audience.  

Megan R. Fizell, Albury 

Curated by Nanette Orly, ‘SIMMER’ is on display at the Murray Art Museum Albury until 13 February 2022. 

Alexa Malizon: Navigating the in-between

/

‘Being part of a culture should bring a sense of belonging,’ Canberra-based artist Alexa Malizon says, ‘but being part of a diaspora means feeling like you’re constantly living in two worlds, and belonging to neither.’

This sense of cultural dissonance is the motivation behind Malizon’s work, which shows at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in her first solo exhibition, ‘Diversitea Talks’. As a Filipino woman born in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Australia, her work reflects her own personal struggles with identity. ‘Since there is such an absence of ethnic minorities in popular culture, I wanted to represent a body that doesn’t exist within the standards of both cultures, and for people to be exposed to it through my works,’ she says.

Malizon has also noticed that a substantial superiority complex exists in the art world when it comes to pop culture – social- and mass-media forms are often treated facetiously in comparison to ‘serious’ art displayed in public galleries, but in reality these platforms define an entire nation’s identity through the sheer scale of their coverage. When ethnic minorities are absent in mass media, however, racial stereotypes prevail, fuelled by prejudice and the lack of genuine experiences with that specific group. Australia, which prides itself on its diversity and multiculturalism, still has a culture of excluding the voices of people of colour from its mainstream discourse. ‘This was the inspiration for my project,’ Malizon says. ‘The title “Diversitea Talks” speaks about diversity, or rather the lack thereof, and “spills the tea” on growing up in a western-dominated world.’

Malizon’s recent works reflect on her self-proposed question: ‘In what ways can the photographic medium explore cultural difference?’ The result is a series of experimental videos that focus on post-production techniques such as video-layering, cropping and karaoke-like subtitling. Through the five works exhibited in ‘Diversitea Talks’, Malizon pulls the audience along as her alter egos experience the embarrassment that being a second-generation immigrant brings to mundane activities like starting at a new school or singing karaoke.

Alexa Malizon is navigating the in-between spaces that are often uncomfortable to talk about and, as a result, are usually brushed under the rug. Her work challenges the binaries of mainstream culture, reminding us that important conversations take place in the infinite shades of grey between polarities of pure black and pure white.

Zeta Xu, Canberra

‘Alexa Malizon: Diversitea Talks’ is currently on display at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra, until 16 December 2021. All artist quotes in this article are taken from a conversation with the author that took place over Zoom on 8 October 2021. Zeta Xu is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

A single drop: Wu Mali’s ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project

/

The Sydney Asian Art Series (SAAS), a collaboration between the Power Institute of the University of Sydney and historian and curator Olivier Krischer, gathers leading voices from all over the world to engage with critical issues in Asian art. This year, the SAAS presented a four-part series titled ‘Art and Environment’, which aimed to discuss the interrelationships of art, environment and eco-political flows. The final event of the series took place on 25 October over an online Zoom webinar, led by Taiwan-based artist, writer and curator Wu Mali. Titled ‘Mending the Broken Land with Water’, the talk explored Wu’s ongoing ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project (2010– ).

Wu began with a series of questions: What can art do in and for the public sphere? How can art practitioners play a role in the context of a capitalised urban space? And how can we rediscover an old land and work towards a new universality? Wu’s work draws much inspiration from the work of post-truth philosopher Bruno Latour’s ideas of a new universality, which refers to a democratised way of acquiring scientific knowledge not by cognition but as an embodied cultural practice.

The ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project takes place across the Danshui River in Taipei, which has been polluted due to overpopulation, industrialisation and mass agriculture. Wu took on the mission to heal the land from a grassroots cultural perspective, using three key initiations to rediscover, reimagine and reinvent the river. First residents of hyper-urbanised Taipei gathered once a month to collaboratively cook and eat a breakfast using produce from local farms. Next, in collaboration with the local Bamboo Curtain Studio, Wu organised for a number of art practitioners to work with schools in public art projects across the river, highlighting the point that immediate surroundings can teach just as much as textbooks. Finally, Wu worked with Professor Huang Jui-Mao to stage a pop-up museum by the river to create dialogues between different demographics in the ways they have engaged with the waterway.

‘There has been a significant impact,’ Wu explained, ‘we have catalysed local grassroots initiations, and the creek has received a lot of attention from both public and private sectors. Also, the residents have gotten to know each other, so the place becomes a so-called home place. Finally, this project has redefined the artist’s and art practitioner’s role in contemporary society.’

These initiations may seem idealistic and insignificant, but they have begun an environmental revolution in the area. Ultimately, the ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project demonstrates how every individual, no matter their age, education level or income, has something to offer.

Zeta Xu

This year the SAAS also featured Patrick Flores (1 and 8 April), Furuhata Yuriko (6 May), and Sugata Ray (16 September). Zeta Xu is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

 

Capturing Country: ‘Art Centres on Screen’

/

Desart is a non-profit organisation supporting the Central Australian Aboriginal art community representing 35 Indigenous-owned community-based art centres. From 1–8 November, Desart is hosting the ‘Art Centres Online’ event featuring the ‘Art Centres on Screen’ film series, followed by the online ‘MarketPlace’ (which takes the place of this traditional showcase as part of the annual Desert Mob festival at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs).  

The program emerged from the successful 2020 Desert Mob symposium which was held online for the first time as a response to the pandemic. In addition to the virtual marketplace and exhibition, the event launched a series of short films made in collaboration with Northern Territory art centres. This year, the initiative was extended to celebrate 14 stories from additional Desart members, including artists from the Minyma Kutjara Arts Project, Papunya Tula Artists’ remote studios and the Uluru Cultural Centre. Filmed on Country, the captivating series highlights the unique stories and influence of culture and community behind a diverse range of contemporary art practices. 

The series includes sisters Norma Bryant and Eva Baker’s accounts of the profound cultural and familial significance of the ‘Two Women’ Dreaming story – a recurring theme in their paintings – while reflecting on their own connection to Country. The films are intended to support the participating art centres and will be featured on their websites and screened at relevant exhibitions.  

Selected shorts are currently screened at the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi festival to complement works from the Minyma Kutjara Arts Project. Following the ‘Art Centres Online’ program, the films will also be presented in Perth at the 2021 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial  in November. The ‘MarketPlace’ offers the opportunity to support Desart members through its online shop, with the profits going directly to the artists and their communities.  

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Canberra

Desart’s ‘Art Centres on Screen’ will take place from 1–4 November before the online ‘MarketPlace’ from 5–8 November 2021.

 

The land’s disquiet: Julia Roche’s ‘Under a Winter Moon’ at MAMA

/

Julia Roche’s paintings in ‘Under a Winter Moon’ capture the sublime qualities of the environment. There is an emotional tethering that is immediately felt when encountering her work, elicited from her sustained connection to the land. Roche created this series on Wiradjuri country, working plein-air under the cover of night at her family property ‘Wooroola’ near Mangoplah and the regenerative farm ‘Bibbaringa’ at Bowna, both situated in the Riverina district of New South Wales.

The crisp winter climate experienced by Roche is captured in the serene beauty of her paintings, depicting hazy waves of rain, glistening frost and coverings of evening mist. The dark ink-blue sky is an omnipresent element throughout the series, shrouding the undulating valleys and hills, as shadowed delineations of trees, shrubs and dams punctuate the landscape. Barely discernible in the dark, they have been manifested by the artist through the recollection of memories and the evocation of feeling. In Night Lit (2021), it is as though the trees have developed buoyancy, floating above a cloak of rain that envelops the valley, illuminated by a radiant wash of silvery moonlight.

Underlying the beauty is a sense of uneasiness in the landscape’s disquiet. With her immediate family working in farming, Roche is no stranger to the perilous nature of the environment. Experiencing devastating droughts and bushfires, she intimately understands nature’s power for destruction which is becoming amplified with the world’s changing climate. ‘Under a Winter Moon’ is an ode to the fertile nurturing brought by vital winter rains and a celebration of the life that water sustains.

The dense overlaying of pigment in the mixed-media paintings Under a Winter Moon I, II and III (all 2021) mirror the abundance of texture and layers of vegetation. Created over multiple sittings, Roche uses a variety of mark-making techniques and materials, including oil paint, pastels and charcoal sourced locally following the recent bushfires. The dense microscopic elements of the bush are magnified and elevated, capturing the gestural feelings of the landscape. By exposing her canvases to the ecosystem, there is a weathering that completes each painting, solidifying its physical connection to the land and, in the words of the artist, ‘serving as a time- and site-specific record of the natural world’.

Roche’s paintings move beyond simply depicting her surrounds and reflect the atmospheric changes and emotive qualities of the land at night. Her surety of touch reveals her empathetic relationship with the environment and deep understanding of the power of nature.

Rebecca Blake, Albury

‘Julia Roche: Under a Winter Moon’ is currently on display at the Murray Art Museum Albury until 28 November.

Beyond museology: ‘The National 2021’

/

A curator’s role when working with living artists in a commissioning context is to encourage artists to create the best possible work for the given circumstances. If that is achieved with consideration, sensitivity and rigor, it is not only apparent in the exhibition’s staging, but in increased audience impact. For a biennial exhibition like ‘The National: New Australian Art’, we can assume that – perhaps unlike an international biennale – local audiences have seen at least some of these practices before. Therefore it is not simply about making an artist’s practice visible, but the focus of the exhibition needs to be on high quality artistic support and presentation. With this particular lens in mind, let us look at this year’s final iteration of ‘The National’. As has been the case with the previous two editions, the 2021 exhibition was presented across three venues, a massive institutional collaboration between the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), all in metro Sydney.

The Carriageworks component was curated by Sydney-based independent curator Abigail Moncrieff. She presented a refreshingly agile and relational curatorial staging for audiences which was demonstrated, in particular, by her sensitivity to exhibition design. Moncrieff exploited sightlines to ensure that careful micro relations were developed between particular works depending on the audience’s viewpoint within the space. An example of this was All the violence within this (2019–21) by Alana Hunt, a video which was viewable from both the front and back of its three screen panels, and which created a dynamic connection with Wamba Wamba/Latji Latji/Wadi Wadi woman Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s Narrbong Galang (2021) through a shared exploration of memory, erasure, violence and country. New staging of works in the main exhibition space rounded off with A Day in the Life (2020), a five-channel installation by the brilliant Karrabing Film Collective. Moving beyond the many museological trappings of classifications, Moncrieff presented a show that flowed together through seemingly effortless and natural connections between works.

The MCA section of ‘The National 2021’ was curated by the museum’s then-longstanding Chief Curator Rachel Kent. With this experience she brought a certain astuteness and awareness of how artists could best traverse the museum spaces and make the most of ceiling heights, natural light and audience flow. A major focus was on female-identifying artists, with work developed to explore shared concerns. Successful installations included Maree Clarke’s Jacob (2020), a multidisciplinary work of photography and glass that was presented liminally (as the light source in a largely darkened space), and Lauren Berkowitz’s Plastic Topographies (2020–21), with the work of suspended recycled plastic strategically placed near one of the only windows in the gallery, providing the opportunity to see both the materiality of the work enveloped by natural light and the world outside the gallery (where plastic pollutants are unfortunately still a common sight at Circular Quay). Engaging installations by Caroline Rothwell, Sally Smart and Judith Wright also made the most of their spaces.

The AGNSW component was curated by the gallery’s Curator of Asian Art, Matt Cox, and Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Erin Vink. Despite exhibiting some of my favourite artists working in Australia today, including the talented Justin Shoulder, Leyla Stevens, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Abdullah M. I. Syed, the curatorial decisions of space and context unfortunately let down the presentation of these artists’ work. Other disappointments included Fiona Hall’s installation work EXODUST, which was completely lost in the entrance foyer (such a shame for one of Australia’s most important senior female artists), and Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler’s sound sculpture Regenerator (also 2021), which felt drowned out by its large thoroughfare space. Perhaps instead of curatorial mistakes, these examples demonstrate how exhibition architecture must stay dynamic to respond to a changing world, and I hope that with the new build of Sydney Modern these concerns are addressed in future exhibitions.

For a national survey exhibition in 2021, we need curatorial vision and exhibition spaces that allow artists to showcase their work in ways that challenge the scope of their practices, pushing them to ambitious new heights. Audiences also need to see Australian art performing to international standards, and to do so requires time, budget, curatorial sensitivity and attention to detail. Some of this is the responsibility of the curator, but wider discussions surrounding funding allocations and institutional spaces need to be considered too.

Tess Maunder, Sydney

This is an edited version of a longer review that appears in the Spring 2021 print edition of Art Monthly Australasia. ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ opened on 26 March 2021 and was shown across Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 5 September; at Carriageworks until 20 June; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 22 August 2021. 

 

Returning the gaze: Angela O’Keeffe’s 'Night Blue'

/

At the height of the Me Too movement, the question of how to deal with the legacies of violent and misogynistic male artists reached its apogee. In a 2018 article for Marie Claire magazine, Roxane Gay wrote that it is ‘quite easy for me to think nothing of the supposedly great art of bad men’, when she remembers ‘all the silence, decades and decades of enforced silence, intimidation, and manipulation, that enabled bad men to flourish’.

As emotionally satisfying as this sentiment may be, it is also a way of sidestepping the question, particularly when it comes to the collections of major institutions. What does it mean to ‘think nothing’ of venerated artworks? Should the National Gallery of Australia, for example, encourage us to ‘think nothing’ of Blue poles (1952) because Jackson Pollock was violent towards his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, and others?   

The American artist Michelle Hartney, conversely, sees the historic juncture of Me Too as an opportunity to expand the art historical record. As part of her guerilla project ‘Correct Art History’, Hartney devises alternative wall labels for artworks hanging in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions that acknowledge the misogyny of their artists. Her revised wall label for Balthus asks: ‘Censoring artists is out of the question, but what is the responsibility of the art institution to educate viewers and turn the presentation of an artist’s work into a teaching moment?’ 

Angela O’Keeffe’s novel Night Blue is another creative correction. Told from the alternating points of view of a PhD candidate and, in a beautiful feat of writerly imagination, the painting itself, the story traces the artwork’s journey from conception in a Long Island barn to Australian cultural icon without shying away from the disturbing behaviour of its creator. Reflecting on its first home away from Pollock, in a private abode, the painting muses: ‘I could have died in that house had I not been sold again. You might ask how a painting can die when it is not in physical danger. But that is a misunderstanding of how a painting lives.’ The painting is nourished by stories; indeed, it only learns about itself by absorbing information from those who gaze upon it. Perhaps this is why, despite spending much of its life in the public eye, it characterises its trajectory as ‘the outer workings of something far more private’. This private thing is not an essential fixed core, known only to itself; nor is it solely the creative and cultural visions of Pollock and the painting’s political champion Gough Whitlam. Rather, it is a kind of collective biography. It longs to be gazed at, but also returns that gaze. 

Night Blue challenges the idea that an artwork only has one story, expanding the record without being didactic. A work of art in its own right, it makes space for the emerging legacy of our current cultural moment – our decision to no longer vanish violence against women from our national story.

Amy Walters

Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe: Transit Lounge Publishing, Melbourne, 2021, 143 pages, AU$27.99; Amy Walters is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Contemporary adaptations and future rituals in Cairns

/

In an eclectic grouping of renowned creatives at Cairns Art Gallery, ‘Ritual: The past in the present’ features work by contemporary Indigenous art stalwarts alongside artistic practices crisscrossing the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting myriad First Nations cultures from New Zealand to Taiwan. Each of the 125 works encapsulates contemporary adaptations, alongside documentation of old ways, of both religious and practical rituals.

The exhibition is a visual treat, spanning two gallery floors. Great swathes of tapestry and weaving, painting, sculptural installation, photography and film (as well as soundscapes) create a complex and immersive experience which offers significant commentary on the present, insights into the past and glimpses of the future (in terms of evolving cultures). 

Marking the eons of human cultural and societal evolution, meaningful rituals to the artists are explored with new mediums. Or, in the case of Janet Fieldhouse’s ceramic and woven works, they are transferred to new modes of expression. Fieldhouse’s sculptures broach subjects traditionally explored in dance, re-framing the stories told via the artefacts themselves: artefacts which would have been incorporated as instruments, props or dress. Important is this display, highlighting the enveloping qualities of traditional dance and storytelling as a holistic expression of artistry and lore. 

Pieces by Brian Robinson and Heather Koowootha are reminiscent of old-time anthropological and botanical fieldnotes and sketches. Their detailed drawings and watercolours tell of custom, design, ecology and the preparation of food and instruments – an ingenious presentation of artefacts and native plants in a way that the earlier studies of Joseph Banks, in hindsight, ought to have (but could never have) included.

One key film, by Dr Christian Thompson AO, breaks away from his usual tableau photography to present an emotive and moving triptych (Berceuse, 2017), in which he chants, sings and evokes the spirit of his Bidjara ancestry. The film is in fine company with several others – further emphasising the encroachment of new media in reimagining old ceremonies, habits and meditations.

‘Ritual: The past in the present’ rethinks the space for collaborative showings of traditional and traditionally inspired contemporary works by Australia’s Indigenous artists and their Asia-Pacific counterparts – all of whom form the rich tapestry of Australia’s evolving postcolonial culture and, through creative exchange, forge the rituals of the future.

Jack Wilkie-Jans, Cairns

Curated by Julietta Park, Teho Ropeyarn and Kylie Burke and presented in partnership with the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), ‘Ritual: The past in the present’ is on display at Cairns Art Gallery until 22 August 2021. The exhibition can be toured virtually online. Jack Wilkie-Jans is an artist, writer and Marketing and Communications Manager of CIAF.

Sparse yet strong: Tate Modern’s ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’

/

London’s Tate Modern threw open its doors in mid-May 2021 to culturally deprived crowds. The winter lockdown of 2021 was long and grim. In a world of newly opened exhibitions, none was more anticipated by Australians stranded far from home than ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’, unveiled 8 June.

In 2015 Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia established the International Joint Acquisition Program (IJAP). An AU$2.75 million corporate gift from Qantas made the five-year program possible, and was established to grow the global reception of Australian art. Nine of the 26 works on display derive from the IJAP. 

In 1992 the High Court of Australia overturned the ‘terra nullius’ doctrine in favour of Eddie Mabo and his co-plaintiffs. Works in the exhibition orbit around Mabo’s pioneering land rights case. Highlighting Australian art before and after 1992, the exhibition seeks ‘to examine debates around land rights and the ongoing legacies of colonialism’. Selected works by artists such as Gordon Bennett, Bonita Ely, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Tracey Moffatt are strong and indicative of Australia’s vibrant visual art scene.

Dale Harding’s The Leap/Watershed (2017) is particularly striking. The artist uses ochre pigments and acrylic paint to tell the story of around 200 Indigenous Australians who, in 1867, jumped off a cliff in the Mackay region to escape capture by the Queensland Native Police Force. Standing in front of Harding’s piece, audiences can hear native birds calling out from Ely’s Jabiluka UO2 (1979) installation in another room. The birdsong further evokes the tragic scene Harding paints. His emotional work sits opposite captivating pieces by Kngwarreye that also tell stories of the land. Tightly positioned dots over linear strokes represent animals, vegetation and landscapes that characterise Anmatyerre creation stories. 

Despite displaying a strong suite of works, the physical display of the exhibition is somewhat sparse and thin. Vernon Ah Kee’s video installation tall man (2010) is buffered by two empty rooms. The exhibition’s introductory space is similarly spare with small images and spread-out wall texts. The result is a feeling of missed opportunity to create visual connections between artists, regions and stories. However, where the exhibition lacks in display, it makes up for in the frankness of its explanatory texts and wall labels that acknowledge the trauma of history both past and present. 

Claire Dalgleish, London

 Curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, Valentina Ravaglia and Tamsin Hong, ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’ is on view at London’s Tate Modern until (European) Spring 2022.

 

 

Connecting artist, object and audience: Lincoln Austin’s ‘The Space Between Us’

/

Video of the public activation of Lincoln Austin’s Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln (2020– ) invites audiences through the doors of the Ipswich Art Gallery and into a tightly curated survey of his last 20 years. In the video, a lightweight and colourful hexagonal ball, a geometric ‘kite’, freewheels through an urban landscape, and is described in the catalogue by exhibition curator Samantha Littley as ‘a prop, a costume and a performance’. The most recent and personally informed work in the exhibition, its joy pervades the whole experience. Titled ‘The Space Between Us’, the survey inside the galleries otherwise explores the optical, spatial and geometric qualities of Austin’s sculpture, requiring the viewer to move around every work to fully appreciate their visual liveliness.

Austin’s early training was in theatre set design in Adelaide. Driven to explore making something a little bit more universal, he looked to geometry and mathematics, using process and set parameters to find a generative model. Austin’s earliest interests, visible in Held by Logic (2000), express a consistent concern with engaging viewers physically.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, grouped by mood and materials rather than chronology, and describes his deep engagement with space and pattern. Austin’s geometric methodology is an iterative model that, as Littley identifies in the catalogue, ‘establishes a connection between artist, object, and audience that is central to Austin’s aims’.

Layers of materials are used to evoke memory, reinforced by titles such as None of That Matters Now (2016). Shadow Boxing #7 (2013) requests that we move like the title suggests to appreciate the nuance in this optical mix. And Deep Space uses cut flyscreen to recreate the depths of perspective through ocular melding. Hang on to Yourself (also 2017), a maze-like installation, captures the viewer as participant and subject with projected light in a darkened room.

The joy in Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln is, in some ways, a revelation of the personal impetus that Austin rejected some 20 years ago, channelled in previous works into mathematical investigations. However, in its more private reality (as a gay man loath to express too much joy), it provides the most poignant entry and epilogue to this survey.

Louise Martin-Chew, Brisbane

Curated by Samantha Littley, ‘Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us’ is on display at Ipswich Art Gallery until 8 August 2021.

Flipping the bird


/

‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’ is a major undertaking for artist Wart and a long time coming. Back in 1993 she visited the Ngorongoro Crater in Northern Tanzania where she first witnessed flamingos in the wild – a flamboyance of flamingos, to use the collective noun. Much later during a European trip in 2018, Wart learnt about the flamingos that had migrated to the swamplands of Venice. 

In this exhibition at Sydney’s Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Wart posits that the flamingo – once at home in pre-colonised Australia over a million years ago – finds its unlikely contemporary equivalent in the ibis. Since the early 1980s Wart has resided in the inner-city of Sydney, where one constant within the flux of aggressive, relentless gentrification is this much-maligned species of birdlife that has increasingly thrived in Australia’s coastal and inland cities. Introduced by conservationists in the early 1970s, the ibis has adapted to the harsh urban environment it finds itself in by being ‘nourished’ from what humans reject as waste: food scraps and other debris sourced from curb-side garbage bins. Nicknamed the ‘bin chicken’ or ‘tip turkey’ for good reason, its very life is dependent on an endless supply of what is dead to us. 

For the exhibition, Wart presents this ultimate ‘outsider’ bird en masse – a wedge of ibis, to use the collective noun – and contrasts it with its superficially superior counterpart, the flamingo. Wart’s series of images playfully reveal the way our conventional, highly gendered norms of beauty are not value-neutral, but rather they speak directly to how appearances and identities are deemed either socially acceptable or are rejected, marginalised and stigmatised. The pink flamingo has accumulated a multitude of meanings associated with its so-called beauty. Pretty in pink, the flamingo has been regarded as exotic and rarefied, decorative and ornate. Inevitably over time, this has gendered and to an extent queered its cultural connotations. Muddied by its proclivity for dumpster diving, the monochromatic ibis has not fared as well in the beauty stakes. 

A longstanding champion for the underdog – or underbird in this case – Wart takes the piss out of the flamingo and sides with the ibis – celebrating the ostracised bird for not conforming to conventional ideas of what is beautiful. This is especially pronounced in one room where Wart presents an ominous ‘wall of eyes’ comprised of multiple paintings of ibis eyeballs gazing at the viewer. In comparison, Wart’s ‘Flamingle Cluster’ of works in the adjacent room, garishly spotlit with pink gels, are anthropomorphised to suggest vanity and self-absorption. 

There is a deeply personal reason for Wart’s attraction to a stigmatised outsider like the ibis. For Wart the multiplicity of bird eyes suggests paranoia and speaks to the mass monitoring we experience in everyday life. As a person living with mental illness since her schizoaffective diagnosis in the late 1980s, Wart likens the eyes to the surveillance and scrutiny patients are subjected to when under constant observation in psychiatric wards. But while the ibis’s outsider status may mirror Wart’s lived experience of mental illness, her work cannot be framed as outsider art. Wart is not an outsider artist, having formally trained at art school in the late 1970s with a stellar four-decades-and-counting career exhibiting and performing in Australia.  

Despite its dark undercurrents and anthropomorphised critique, ‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’ is a witty and accessible tribute to Wart’s current obsessions, her unique take on life and her singular place in the world. Thinking about the feathers she ruffles with this new body of work, I am taken back to when I first encountered Wart around 2008 when she had plastered missing posters around Chippendale for her pet parrot, Fingers. Captioning a photo of Fingers perched on her shoulder in her unmistakable handwriting, she wrote: Gone Missing – The Bird! Very cheeky. Contact Wart ph 93182328. 

I am happy that Wart has finally found her bird.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Sydney

This text was originally commissioned to accompany Wart’s exhibition ‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’, on view at Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney, until 11 July. Daniel Mudie Cunningham is Director of Programs at Carriageworks.


Working through ‘The Dark Side’

/

The conflation of mental illness with artistic ingenuity, and suffering with compelling artwork, have permeated much of the complicated history connecting art and mental health. While awareness of the latter seems to have grown significantly over the last ten years, especially since the pandemic, it is an issue that can still be very challenging to understand and to talk about.

It was against this complex backdrop that ‘The Dark Side’, a recent Perth exhibition spread across Gallery25 at Edith Cowan University and There Is in Northbridge, offered a refreshing new lens to reflect on the connection between art and mental wellbeing. Curated by Ted Snell (Honorary Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University), ‘The Dark Side’ brought together a multi-generational group of 14 Western Australian artists for whom artmaking can be a means to work through pain, difficulties and the shadows of the psyche.

The resulting artworks were as varied as each individual artist. Sharyn Egan’s Our Babies (2019), a series of around 100 doll beds fashioned from sardine cans, fabric and gravel, was created in response to the artist’s experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations. Installed in two orderly rows across both venues, the work used repetition alongside a minimalist aesthetic to powerful and solemn effect. Mary Moore’s etchings with mixed media from 1976 used a similarly restricted palette to explore the artist’s grief surrounding the loss of her sister. The works carried a diaristic tone with cryptic white marks on chalkboard-like black, giving them a sense of private interiority.

Mysterious symbols also surfaced in Tyrown Waigana’s expressive gestural paintings. With A Nice Place to Hate Yourself (2021), the artist employed vibrant magentas, yellows, oranges, blues and browns to create a surrealist scene of shifting perspectives and unease. At each venue, the works were positioned behind a mythic-looking creature shaped from polymer clay, a seeming guardian of the otherworldly spaces of Waigana’s paintings.

Mystical beings also abounded in Tarryn Gill’s seductive soft sculptures of beguiling cats and flying creatures, contortionists and grinning moons. These ‘Tricksters’ (2018), with their lush textures of fur, sequins and darting LED eyes, beckoned viewers into a world that appeared mischievous and playful yet potentially perilous and unsafe.

This allure of darkness – the pull between death and desire – appeared in a number of works, such as D’Arcy Coad’s ‘Morbid Curiosities’ (2020–21), a series of collages that juxtaposed fashion photography and film-noir stills with macabre imagery of post-mortem examinations and car crashes. In Roderick Sprigg’s painting Chicken (2019), two cars appeared frozen in time amid a head-on collision, recalling feelings such as shock, guilt and shame that can surface on reflection of difficult moments in the past. In her woven portraits of men whom she had jarring encounters with on Tinder, Carla Adams similarly spent time visually manifesting a source of pain or fear, seeming to wrest control to give it a life that she had agency in directing.

By contrast, Anna Nazzari’s tender watercolours grappled with the legacy of climate change and envisioned moments in the future. ‘The Harbingers’ (2020–21), a series of small drawings, depicted close-up details of bruised and diseased dolphin eyes, while Immersive (2020) showed a man all but swallowed up by the sea. In their delicately rendered details, the profound sadness and plausibility of Nazzari’s drawings felt all the more harrowing.

By placing emphasis on the artist’s process, ‘The Dark Side’ encouraged deeper reflection on the relationship between the artist and their artwork and, in turn, a more empathetic reading. The exhibition could have easily veered into voyeuristic territory or down the well-trodden path that pairs suffering and creativity. While at times ‘The Dark Side’ walked a tightrope through this terrain, it explored the topic with respect, nuance and commendable complexity.

Megan Hyde, Perth

‘The Dark Side’ was shown at Gallery25, Edith Cowan University, and at There Is, Perth, from 27 May until 17 June.

Constructing a national narrative: The NCPI in Taipei

/

The National Centre of Photography and Images (NCPI) in Taipei opened in March this year after months of construction delays that coincided with COVID-19 concerns. The highly anticipated new institution is the first of its kind in Taiwan, and the fruition of persistent lobbying for over 15 years.

Housed in a restored Japanese-era colonial building, the centre aims to develop a Taiwanese history of photography through research, exhibitions and a growing collection. This effort was inspired by a conference held at the fourth Taipei Photo Festival in 1994 that called for the establishment of a photography museum in Taiwan to preserve the ongoing cultural contributions of the medium to Taiwanese society. Recognising the value of images as a cultural heritage and asset, Taiwanese photographers and academics continued to advocate for a dedicated institution, forming the Society of Photographic Museum and Culture of Taiwan in 2006, an association that began to lobby the Ministry of Culture.

By 2014, the restoration of the centre’s building had begun, and the National Taiwan Museum alongside the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts were both involved in organising and developing the collection archives, publications and preservation practices. The government support and effort highlight the ways in which art institutions construct national narratives. For the NCPI, the emphasis on a national photographic history is seen through its inaugural collection exhibition, ‘Hold the Mirror up to His Gaze: the Early History of Photography in Taiwan (1869–1949)’, a large-scale display of 600 images highlighting the changing sociopolitical contexts they were produced in. As the centre seeks to further place Taiwan internationally, it has also hosted the longtime touring exhibition ‘A Handful of Dust: from the Cosmic to the Domestic’, curated by David Campany, as part of its opening program. These objectives, with the establishment of the NCPI, provide a formal framework to promote and advance the photographic medium in Taiwan. The ambitious scope and impressive calibre of the opening exhibitions are promising, as the centre evolves to increase engagement with the public to inspire experiments in contemporary practice.

The NCPI exemplifies a long-term commitment to photography, and its opening came at a time when the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) had gone into several months of ‘hibernation’ due to financial losses and funding cuts over a difficult few years. A leading photography arts organisation operating since 1974, the ACP has supported some of Australia’s most prominent artists. It is imperative for independent cultural spaces like the ACP to survive and, hopefully, its restructuring (said to be announced by July) will allow it to continue contributing to photography in Australia in meaningful and sustainable ways.

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei

Unpacking the ‘wunderkammer’: The 2021 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize

/

Described by judges as ‘a poignant, beautiful and major work’, a painting that examines the historical idea of a wunderkammer (or cabinet of curiosities) for contemporary eyes has won the 2021 Ravenswood School for Girls Australian Women’s Art Prize, the country’s highest value art prize for female artists. Vault (2020) by Sydney-based Caroline Rothwell (Yavuz Gallery), which was also a finalist in last year’s Sir John Sulman Prize, looks at what the artist has called ‘a Western disconnect from nature’ at a time that ‘a battle rages to recognise the value of traditional knowledge and the natural world’.

The emerging artist prize was won by Symone Male from Brisbane for Contagious, a timely and joyful painting depicting a woman in the act of ‘performative cleaning’ during the pandemic. Notably, Bulgul artist Imelda Wood Melamurrk from the Northern Territory won the Indigenous Emerging Artist Prize for her painting My Sister’s Birth on a Full Moon. The works of the 102 finalists are on display in Sydney, until 30 May.

For more information, click here or, to watch the announcement of winners for 2021, click here.