Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 67 i Artist Profile

Julie Rrap was in her late teens and living in a share house in South Brisbane when she and a group of friends took magic mushrooms. An image she hallucinated while studying her reflection in a glass windowpane at night has never left her. It was the face of an older woman looking back at her, she recounts, a woman she understood to be her future self. In telling the story now, it is as clear as when she first experienced it, as if the memory collapses the stretch of time between then and now. This sense of the past speaking to the present, and of the present to the past, energises Rrap’s recent work, which comprises performative drawings, video, and a 400-kilogram bronze sculpture. The body and performativity are…

The title of Judy Watson’s forty-year survey at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is from a poem written by her son Otis Carmichael in Waanyi language, and translates as “tomorrow the tree grows stronger.” In this context it underlines a central thread running through the exhibition. Each work has seductive visual qualities, and fits within a larger narrative seeking justice for Aboriginal and other First Nations peoples, and other often silenced forces including the environment, women, brutal colonial histories, grief, and loss. Together they build a sense of a rising and irresistible force that won’t be quenched, a cultural reclamation that has blazed its own trail. This is Watson’s largest survey to date and spans the breadth of her work—printmaking where she started, her emotive and water-in-fused unframed canvases that…

The outpouring of universal grief prompted by Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, has reverberated throughout the world as one of the most powerful anti-war statements since its making in April 1937. Cubism’s most shattering image artistically unleashed by the catastrophic bombing of civilians of the small Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Nearing a century later, Guernica was to be tragically relived. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declared on a live broadcast to Spanish members of parliament: “It’s April 2022, but it feels like April 1937, when the world learned about what was happening in one of your cities, Guernica.” The internationally renowned artist George Gittoes has no qualms in catapulting himself into dangerous, hyperreal war zones. He has been doing this for the last fifty years. The unstoppable Gittoes…

Between 1880 and 1925, Paris was reinventing itself as a modern city. The process had commenced somewhat earlier, when under Napoleon III (1848-1870) and his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the heart of old Paris was ripped out. Between 1852 and 1870 wide avenues, squares, new railway stations, and new parks were developed to transform Paris into a mecca for tourism and one that was studded with emblems of modernism. The poor, who previously inhabited these areas, were forced out to the fringes of the city. This exhibition, Paris: Impressions of Life 1880 – 1925, examines aspects of Parisian life drawn from the extensive but relatively little-known collection of the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, supplemented with a number of strategic loans, mainly from the National Gallery of…

A dam Douglas Hill, better known by his longstanding moniker Blak Douglas, is an Indigenous artist with strong connections to Western Sydney and the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. This is important to preface, as the documentary’s provocative title, Blak Douglas vs The Commonwealth, focusses on the histories and experiences of Indigenous people from New South Wales. Western Sydney has one of the highest populations of Indigenous people in the country, and the inner-city suburb of Redfern for many decades was a vital hub for Indigenous people criss-crossing the state and moving from regional areas to the city. The director of this unfunded, feature length documentary, Cristina Dio, understands the importance of these locales and histories. The opening scenes immediately place the viewer within the streets of Redfern, immersed in…

World Emoji Day will be celebrated on 17 July 2024. As we all think about how to mark this increasingly significant annual event, it is timely to consider how emoji have entered the legal landscape. A recent legal precedent from Canada demonstrates that a single thumbs up text message (with no accompanying words) can bind parties to a commercial contract. A court in NSW held that use of an emoji can be defamatory. The Australian Law Reform Commission has published an article asking, Should we use emojis in legislative drafting?, 2023. This is only the beginning! Let’s have a closer look at where we are, and where we might be going. All lawyers are taught that a legally binding contract comes into existence when an offer by one party is…

In a world dominated by linguistic communication, Ebony Truscott feels more at home in the elusive realm of visual and tactile sensation. She prefaces our conversation by saying, “I feel like I can be more eloquent in my art than in spoken language, sometimes.” However, it quickly becomes evident that Truscott’s enduring focus and passion for drawing and painting the world she sees and feels, via the distilled space of the studio, requires keen observation and a deep understanding of what art has the capacity to do. The still life is a well-worn artistic genre, originating in Italy in the 1500s, and brought to prominence in Northern Europe in the seventeenth century. Artists from Georg Flegel to Pieter Claesz, from Louise Bourgeois to Andy Warhol, have all tried their hand…

Since when did any commercial art gallery offer “surgery hours?” Since Hughes at Olsen opened in Sydney on May 1, that’s when. Every Friday between 10 a.m. and noon, Evan Hughes will be ready and willing to speak to artists and art students who can simply drop by unannounced and shoot the breeze about whatever. It’s an idea Hughes drew from Cambridge University where he studied art history. “The deans of studies always had surgery hours where anyone could pop in with any question they wanted at a specific time,” Hughes says. The idea also nods in the direction of Hughes’ father, the late Ray Hughes, who was famous for his impassioned conversations with droppers-in at his Ray Hughes Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney. Hughes believes the Australian art world…

It was the silence that got me. It was uncanny. As if I’d crossed an invisible portal into another world. A few minutes before I’d been on Melbourne’s Johnston Street, with its heavy trucks, orange commuter buses, crowded pavements, hipster gin palaces, vinyl record stores, and trains to Flinders Street passing overhead at Victoria Park Station. It’s as near to the inner city as makes no difference. I was meeting my friend Alistair, a sound artist, who lives close to Abbotsford Convent and who has only great things to say about the wide menu of attractions it offers. We were walking towards a couple of church spires that we could see in the treelined distance. A short side street led us straight to the heart of the Convent complex. We…

History and identity are the main themes of this BoS, with a focus on LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous issues as well as climate change, colonisation, the horrors of war, and the atomic age. The curators bring an enthusiasm to the project and have tried to create a “carnivalesque” atmosphere that celebrates life. The BoS takes place across seven venues. Costinaș and Guerrero’s ambition is to challenge our preconceptions through expressions of hope and joy that celebrate the resistance and resilience that occurs during times of crisis, such as the HIV / AIDS pandemic, atomic testing in the Asia-Pacific region, transgressions against Indigenous people, past and present colonisation, and currently the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Guerrero’s interest in sociology and Costinaș’ in art history is apparent but it’s sociology that has…

Biennials, or biennales, are no mean feat—for curators, artists, host institutions, and audiences. The challenge lies in the delicate dance of marrying a cohesive curatorial theme with the artists selected, balancing the practical aspects of the gallery and potential installation constraints, navigating the artists’ intentions and amount of output realised, whilst considering how audiences will react in two years’ time, and what kind of world that might indeed be in. With all this in mind, one must unravel a biennial accordingly. Curated by UNSW Galleries Director José Da Silva and titled Inner Sanctum, the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (Kaurna Yerta), is a rich survey exhibition presenting twenty-four artists and poets whose work reflects contemporary Australian art practice now. Inner Sanctum, Da…

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I meet with Christopher Bassi in his studio on infamous Boundary Street (the former margin of Magandjin / Brisbane’s once segregated city limits). It is well-lit and crisp white—flanked by large canvases in gradating stages of completion and a desk with the usual office tackle. Books naturally pile around, and chronicle painters of influence including Velázquez, Goya, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and William Blake. Beginning with classes in oil as a child and moving to textile design in his adolescence, Bassi undertook formal training at Queensland College of Art in 2017 where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting and art theory. Painting—the very impost of painters—is an indissoluble premise of his practice. Bassi is first and foremost a painter in the service of painting. In oil, he maintains…

As many artists of his generation experienced, if as a student you showed the slightest creative inclination but also demonstrated academic ability you were funnelled by the school guidance counsellor into an architecture degree: if you were, God forbid, also numerate, your destiny was engineering, certainly not art school. Richard Dunn began his studies in architecture at the University of New South Wales and undertook further studies in painting and sculpture at the National Art School (also known at various times as East Sydney Technical College), winning the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1966. The scholarship was judged by the Antipodean painter and director of the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, John Brack. After winning the scholarship, which changed the course of his life and career, Dunn moved to…

Landscape has been a dominant force in Australian art since colonial times, a place for myth and legend to play out, the supreme example being Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, 1946-47, where human and landscape meld and morph into one mythic dreaming. Then there is Fred Williams who reinvented how to describe and see the eviscerated guts of Australia with his painterly shorthand, and the hard to pin down Ian Fair-weather, someone who had little to no interest in the official art world but compulsively made paintings informed by his life and exploits from anything and on anything at his adopted bush camp on Yarun (Bribie Island). Joe Furlonger has had to navigate this rich and vital investigation of the Australian landscape, and it has only seemed to energise him.…

Dale Frank: Growers and Showers at the National Art School Galleries is more than enough. Even the catalogue essay by Wes Hill grants that the works are "visually too much at times." Perhaps the mystical and proto-psychedelic William Blake could be conscripted here to defend Frank, "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." This retrospective of recent works offers a queer aesthetic ostentation, a glitzy excess of excess. The title alone suggests by way of carnal intonation, a both / and quality, mapping a rendezvous for two kinds of art: growers and showers. "The pride of the peacock,” wrote Blake, "is the glory of God." The terms grower and shower refer to states of arousal and presentation, male members that are not impressive when flaccid but grow…

In Mothers, Fathers Jelena Telecki deftly handles the complexity of her exhibition’s perennial, titular subjects—parenthood, childhood, ancestry, and inheritance. Her first solo exhibition at a major Australian gallery is a haunting exploration of universal themes, but a further, stated intent to grapple with Yugoslavian history proves more elusive. Nespokojstvo (foreboding uneasiness) is the Serbian word Jelena Telecki offers for the mood underlying the nine works in Mothers, Fathers. It is her debut solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the first in the Gallery’s inaugural Contemporary Projects series to showcase New South Wales artists. With a subdued palette of grey-blues and black, slick surfaces, theatrical compositions, and a cast of ghostly characters, the promise of nespokojstvo is fulfilled by an icy, ethereal suite. The paintings Mothers,…

Enter the main gallery at Wollongong Art Gallery and you will immediately notice the energetic and dense Beach combing South Coast, 2023, by Suzanne Archer on the back wall. You’d be forgiven for marching straight down the centre of the room to get a closer look. But turn right instead, follow the slow hexagonal arc of the gallery. Notice first the small suite of gouache landscapes by Elisabeth Cummings, with their flattened muted colours, so impenetrable until they begin to melt gently, like the bush on a hot afternoon. Then Noel McKenna’s honest paintings, some populated by the bright, square fibro homes of the 1950s; a man watering the lawn out front, a suburban cat on the warm concrete driveway, the dog track at Dapto. And on it goes. More paintings…