April issue's letter from the editor

Simon Denny, Amazon Worker Cage Patent (US 9,280,157 B2: ‘System for transporting personal within an active workspace’, 2016) with King Island Brown Thornbill renders, 2019, installation view, ‘Mine’, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, 2019–20; photo: Jesse Hunniford, MONA

When writer Sophia Halloway interviewed artist eX de Medici in her Canberra studio in late January, the air around our nation’s capital was still filled with bushfire smoke, and the sense of alarm at our climate emergency extraordinarily intense. De Medici told Halloway how the biggest long-term threat is apathy: ‘slowly, slowly, then all at once.’

Two months on, and our national attention has already moved on to another health emergency, and summer seems a long time ago now.

If a thematic thread can be found in this April edition, it is the refusal by artists to look away from the complicated issues around the impacts of climate change. In her review of the ‘Water’ show at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Rebecca Blake notes how, through the artworks on display, ‘we are made to viscerally feel the physical shifts in the environment that are slowly but surely spilling over to impact each individual’. While in his essay on Simon Denny’s ‘Mine’ exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Oscar Capezio writes how ‘there is uncertainty about the place of art in a time of climate crisis, particularly its ability to affect real change or sustain our concern towards engagement’.

While proofreading this April edition, it struck me how writers have become important mediators in this growing art discourse around the environment, and it is also interesting to note that Halloway, Blake and Capezio are all emerging alumni of the ANCA Critic-in-Residence (CiR) program, which has allowed Art Monthly Australasia to respond more actively to the artistic concerns that impact on our national psyche here in Canberra.

Our thanks go to artsACT for once again generously supporting our partnership with the ANCA CiR program, and to all the artists and writers who continue to act against apathy. 

Michael Fitzgerald, Editor