'The Static of Nature' by Tane Andrews

Tane Andrews, The Static of Nature, 2017; image courtesy the artist

Tane Andrews, The Static of Nature, 2017; image courtesy the artist

An idea starts out as something unavoidable and then it’s slowly pulled into focus through research and development and trial and error. It was here within my studio in Sydney and the surrounding environment that I was inspired by a continual force in nature, where even tiny and minute changes could shift things in a new direction. In the end the work was reduced to its most basic of elements, which was a single pearl, on a ceramic plate, being rocked back and forth.

The Static of Nature is being shown as part of the 2017 edition of ‘Sculpture at Bathers’, at Kidogo Arthouse and the surrounding Bathers Beach Art Precinct in Fremantle, Western Australia, 25 February – 12 March 2017. See  https://vimeo.com/199753015

Tintin Wulia at Art Stage Singapore

Tintin Wulia, Untold Movements Act 1 – Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland, 2015, installation view; 32-channel sound installation, dimensions variable; image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Tintin Wulia, Untold Movements Act 1 – Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland, 2015, installation view; 32-channel sound installation, dimensions variable; image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

It’s not what we come to expect from an art fair, the darkened recesses of Tintin Wulia’s Untold Movements – Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland (2015), which features in the curated Southeast Asia Forum’s ‘Net Present Value: Art, Capital, Futures’, showing as part of the current 2017 edition of Art Stage Singapore (until 15 January).

Voices cry out in the cavernous space – plangent, philosophical – expressing doubt and uncertainty, and slipping from the singular to the universal, their location and identity unknown. ‘There is no single way to describe my part of the world,’ says one. ‘There must be a way out of this,’ says another. Within the context of an art fair, where both artworks and the nationality of artists are traded and fixed, such fluidity is a refreshing (and essential) counterpoint.

‘When I was born, god didn’t play dice,’ says the artist on her YouTube video, How Tintin became The Most International Artist in the Universe (see www.tintinwulia.com). ‘He saw all the possibilities and created parallel universes.’ Born in Denpasar and more recently based in Brisbane, Wulia’s interdisciplinary work (which will represent Indonesia at this year’s Venice Biennale) speaks of the shadow land of globalisation, of souls lost in displacement and hovering between states and national borders.

Untold Movements was commissioned by Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2015 (with assistance from The Keir Foundation) and comprises a 32-channel sound installation employing some 15 narrative voices among which audiences must wander, snatching at fragments of personal histories – hinting at the artist’s own experience of being deported from Germany on suspicions of illegal entry, but also inspired by Wulia’s encounters with other stories of displacement, including a Melbourne taxi driver dreaming of life in the Middle East and the Indonesian writer Sobron Aidit (1934 – 2007), exiled in China during the political tumult of 1965.

Just when audiences gain intimacy with these disparate voices and stories, their narratives are further fragmented by the sound of fireworks (or are they gun shots?) which erupt and echo through the darkness, dispelling the possibility of any single truth – only multiplicity has meaning. It’s a sobering thought for audiences as they step out into the unblinking light of the fair.

Michael Fitzgerald, Editor

‘Artist and Empire’ at the National Gallery Singapore

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Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies, exhibition install view featuring the work of Lee Wen (left) and George Francis Joseph; image courtesy the National Gallery Singapore

A year after opening, the National Gallery Singapore is setting the benchmark for Southeast Asian art museums. The current ‘Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies’ is an ambitious collaboration with Tate Britain, reconfiguring the important exhibition first presented in London in late 2015. It’s rich, subtle and surprising, demonstrating the persistence of British imperial vision, but also the gradual emergence of cultural independence in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the focus of this iteration.

Two sections mirror the rise – and fall – of Empire. ‘Countering the Empire’ shows mainly works by British artists, or made for British patrons: images of domination like Thomas James Barker’s astonishing 1863 painting of Queen Victoria bestowing a Bible on a grateful colonial. Yet this history is not unmarked by defeat: Saburo Miyamoto’s official 1942 painting showing the British surrender to the Japanese makes a rare appearance; more ominously, Lady Elizabeth Butler’s 1879 painting of a lone survivor of the First Afghan War in the 1840s points to today. Unlike in London, contemporary works speak back to the imperial pomp. Opening the show, the nineteenth-century sculpture of Raffles, Singapore’s colonial founder, is a fine example of détournement: a large photomural shows Lee Wen's 2000 performance, which elevated ordinary citizens to Raffles’s exalted height by means of specially constructed scaffolding; photographic works by Australian Indigenous Michael Cook gesture to this nation’s still-ambiguous relationship with British authority.

The second section, ‘Encountering Artistic Legacies’, shows regional artists establishing distinctive visions of their homelands: among many fascinating artworks, portraits by New Zealander Charles Frederick Goldie and Singapore’s Cheong Soo Pieng, batik paintings by Chuah Thean Teng, and works by early twentieth-century Burmese artists sketch unfolding local imageries.

‘Artist and Empire’ is not without naysayers: many works in this ravishing show are troubling, ambiguous reminders of an imperial history many would prefer to forget. Yet it’s necessary: dealing with the past, in order to go forward. ‘Artist and Empire’ runs until 26 March 2017 – definitely worth visiting.

Julie Ewington, Singapore

 

‘Primavera 2016’ at the MCA

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Primavera 2016: Young Australian Artists, exhibition install view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2016, featuring: Mira Oosterweghel, Precarious Life, 2016; Steven Cybulka, Divisions, 2016; and Ruth McConchie, salines, sirius, obelisk, 2016; image courtesy and © the artists; photo: Christopher Snee

‘Primavera’ is the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s annual exhibition of Australian artists aged 35 and under. Rather than focus on the artist’s hand, the 2016 iteration (which ran from 29 September until 4 December 2016) focused on the viewer’s body, with curator Emily Cormack exploring recent theories of embodied cognition, proposing that the creation of knowledge begins in the body rather than the brain.

The exhibition was curated in several sections exploring aspects of the body’s ‘porosity’: the respiratory, sensory, skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine and limbic systems. A small copper button near the exhibition’s entrance signalled Emily Parsons-Lord’s work The Confounded Leaving (2016), which released air akin to that of 250 million years ago during the earth’s greatest extinction period. Viewers heading the other way at the exhibition’s entrance were seduced by vinyl tape on the floor and a glowing blue light towards a dead end – the hue in Biljana Jancic’s A Beach (Beneath) (2016) being emitted from an empty projector. Past Parsons-Lord’s work the walls were punctuated by Danae Valenza’s Your Motion Says (2016), a series of neon squiggles reminiscent of shorthand, their lights and accompanying sounds swelling and receding with viewer proximity.

The exhibition’s bones were formed by Steven Cybulka’s structural intervention Divisions (2016), around which the other works spiralled within the gallery. These included Adelle Mills’s four-channel video work Axiom of Maria (2016) in which four performers interpreted a series of gestures, Pia van Gelder’s Recumbent Circuit (2016) which invited the audience to apply hands and feet to copper pads in order to activate the conductive properties of their bodies, and Ruth McConchie’s salines, sirius, obelisk (2016), a headset taking viewers on a virtual journey through the exhibition’s walls to its real and imagined surrounds. Suspended above it all was the rope ladder of Mira Oosterweghel’s Precarious Life (2016), over which a performer would occasionally move, bringing a sense of literally heightened risk to the double-height gallery space.

For an exhibition placing our fleshy selves at its core, ‘Primavera 2016’ was slick, minimal and inorganic. The artists employed synthetic and manufactured materials in new and experimental technologies, evoking a futuristic world of artificial air and light, virtual reality and holograms, and constructed environments and interfaces. While the exhibition opened up the possibility of the viewer leaving the space with a heightened sense of the body’s engagement with its context, the challenge for ‘Primavera’ was for audiences to engage with these often subtle works, displayed within the context of contemporary visual art, in a way which effectively explored the intent of the works and the show. Nonetheless, the exhibition was an intriguing curatorial vignette which explored the possibilities of the body as interface for the creation of knowledge.

Chloé Wolifson, Sydney

Online review: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran at the Ian Potter

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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, In the Beginning, exhibition detail view, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2016; photo: Christian Capurro

Contemporary ceramics is currently gaining much popular traction with Australian artists such as Glenn Barkley, Pepai Jangala Carroll, Juz Kitson and Madeleine Preston working within a medium that has, up until relatively recently, been relegated to the realm of the decorative arts and crafts. Sri Lankan–Australian artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is largely described as a ceramicist, and while this title has earned him tens of thousands of dollars in awards and grants from the ceramics community, his background is in painting and his approach is decidedly interdisciplinary. Rather than speaking to the categorisation of ceramics as craft, his solo exhibition at Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, ‘In the Beginning’ (until 26 February 2017), boldly refers to its earlier status in antiquity, as historical artefact, and this line of inquiry is not confined to ceramics.

A loosely handpainted figure, reminiscent of both the artist’s numerous self-portraits and Manet’s Olympia (1863), stretches across a wall of the uppermost gallery of the Ian Potter. In place of the bouquet and handmaiden in the original Manet is Philip Wilson Steer’s Flowers in a glass vase (1892) from The University of Melbourne Art Collection, differentiated from Nithiyendran’s work by a stark white placard noting its title and origin. Having been given access to the University’s Cultural Collections, ‘In the Beginning’ is littered with such ‘curiosities’ as a monkey skull, tiger snake, taxidermy swan and, of course, ceramics from the University’s Classics and Archaeology Collection – all distinguished by their traditional white gallery labels. Alongside these carefully curated relics, Nithiyendran’s unfired clay sculptures are imbued with the same tokenism, becoming an iconoclastic interrogation into religion, colonialism, the body and their relationship to culture – particularly in relation to the problematic field of archaeological collections management and exhibition.

Ironically, just one level below Nithiyendran’s exhibition at the Ian Potter is the exhibition ‘The Dead Don’t Bury Themselves’ (until 19 March 2017), featuring Early Bronze Age vessels from Bab edh-Dhra in the Dead Sea plain of southern Jordan, alongside ceramics and human remains from the Australian Institute of Archaeology. This considered, the inclusion of ‘Indian human hair’ as a part of Nithiyendran’s materials list, and ‘at’ signs before his name written in graffiti-style painting on the gallery’s walls, appear to reference both the physical and online presence of the artist, calling into question the state of the person (particularly the person of colour) as archive.

Audrey Schmidt, Melbourne

Sneak Peek of Our December Issue! : The 5th Singapore Biennale

Chia Chuyia,&nbsp;Knitting the Future, 2015–16, installation view, 5th Singapore Biennale, 2016; performance with knitting needles and leeks, dimensions variable; image courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

Chia Chuyia, Knitting the Future, 2015–16, installation view, 5th Singapore Biennale, 2016; performance with knitting needles and leeks, dimensions variable; image courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

It is impossible to objectively review a biennale, where so much depends on what route you take, what corner you turn, what artists you happen to meet. Arriving at the 5th Singapore Biennale, entitled ‘An Atlas of Mirrors’, this critical conundrum seemed heightened, as the curatorium of nine experts from around Southeast, South and East Asia provided, not so much a roadmap through the 58 artworks occupying nine ‘conceptual zones’, as a labyrinth. With the Biennale’s title partly inspired by the 1991 film Prospero’s Books, my personal experience was not unlike being immersed in Peter Greenaway’s film – beautiful though often obtuse, with flashes of visual poetry lighting the way.

My first key turning point took me, ironically, away from the Biennale’s primary site – the former St Joseph’s Institution that is the Singapore Art Museum – and down a side street past a shop selling Catholic religious souvenirs. Setting up shop opposite was Swedish-based Malaysian artist Chia Chuyia. Behind a protective pane of glass, and with a look of sweet determination, Chia sat, knitting herself a suit from green strands of leek – ‘to protect the body,’ she has said, ‘from an unknown future.’

On the top floor of the 8Q building above Chia’s performance, I found Pakistani artist Adeela Suleman surrounded by her exquisite Persian and Mughal-inspired miniature paintings on ceramic plates with elaborately carved frames. Like highly perfumed flowers, the paintings drew me in to discover scenes of surprising blood-spurting carnage. As the artist has noted, ‘the more heinous the crime, the more beautiful the object needs to be’.

Interestingly, it was a morning’s excursion away from the Biennale, to the off-site parallel project of Berlin-based French artist Agathe de Bailliencourt at the new Hermès gallery Aloft, that helped unlock the labyrinth for me. Contemplating Bailliencourt’s pencil drawings of clouds formed by the multitudinous repetition of the word maintenant (or, ‘now’ in French), and adjacent Zen pebble garden of subtly shaded tones of pastel blue, entitled ‘Here from Here’, I realised that what the Biennale was offering through its maze of mirrors and maps was a precious sense of being and belonging in this part of Southeast Asia.

 

Michael Fitzgerald, Editor

Isaac Julien Takes 'Refuge' in Sydney

Isaac Julien, En Passage (Stones Against Diamonds), 2015, Premier Photograph, 180 x 240cm, Edition of 6 plus 1 AP; image Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Freshly unveiled in Sydney, the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery delivers a new exhibition from British artist Isaac Julien. Titled 'Refuge', the gallery brings together a survey of works spanning almost a decade of the artist's career. The collection consists of Julien’s poetic cinematography and photographic installations shot in locations across three continents.

Geography is a recurring theme in the work, alongside displacement. Featuring landscapes such as the Icelandic Vatnajökull caves – among Europe’s biggest glaciers – along with Palazzo Gangi, where Luchino Visconti filmed The Leopard in 1963, cartographies begin to speak of the wider concerns of the world today. The artist critically responds to spaces that are suspended on the edge of crisis and change.

The elements of war, moving populations, transcultural exchange and the neglected natural world are brought together in refined theory and visual beauty to create a 'modern-day requiem'. There is the persistent element of hope, however, with the desire for betterment lurking throughout the work, which is on show until 19 November.

Isaac Julien, Echo (Stones Against Diamonds), 2015, Duratrans image in lightbox, 120 x 120cm, Edition of 4 plus 1 AP.; image Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Ajit Ninan: The Searing Art of Political Commentary

AJIT NINAN, Installation view, MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY, CANBERRA; image COURTESY CAITLIN SEYMOUR-KING

As part of the 'Confluence' festival celebrating India in Australia, the Museum of Australian Democracy brings us an exhibition on prolific political cartoonist Ajit Ninan. Snuggled inside Old Parliament House in Canberra, the grand building features a series of small spaces that shoot off broad sweeping corridors, a perfect site for this intimate exhibition.

The main exhibition space is the size of a decent bedroom, or what would have been a mid-sized office for the ministers of old. The colours are warm reds and oranges with soft lighting. There are several small illustrations framed around the room, and a silent projection plays in the far corner. The modest display mimics the way that Ninan’s cartoons first present to the viewer. They are simple small sketches, some in colour, and mostly unassuming in presence. But when you look closer, there lies the searing political commentary, the unashamed condemnation of political figures, the concisely captured complexities of everyday life.

Political cartooning is a very intriguing artform. It is a practice prevalent across the globe and shows us how active critique is absolutely essential for political and social systems. The simplicity and humour indicative of the artform is the key to its success. Refined 'just so' to a single image, it allows the artist to deliver an impactful message and reach audiences.

A further dimension to this is the state of the modern democracy: over-saturated with media, news and information. Ninan steps outside of the circus to remark on just how absurd things can become as we attempt to navigate our way through a democracy increasingly directed by bureaucracy, technology and economics. Furthermore, the modern democracy is heavily peppered with individual egos, committed to their own agendas. Ninan assertively examines the double speak of politicians to determine what they are in between the vapour of what they say.

For those of us not expert in the political landscape of India, do not fear: each illustration is accompanied with a helpful explanation to fill you in. Otherwise the show resonates very comfortably with Australia's own rich history of political cartooning and age-old tradition of vocally challenging government.

AJIT NINAN, Installation view of 'politrix' series, MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY, CANBERRA; image COURTESY CAITLIN SEYMOUR-KING

Waterhouse Art Prize Arrives in Canberra

Winner of the Emerging Artist Category: Dan Power, G[RAZED], 2016, Pen and ink on bull skull; image courtesy the national archives of australia, canberra

This week, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) launched its leg of the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, for which it is an exclusive partner with the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. The biennial prize and exhibition - named in honour of zoologist and first curator of the SA Museum, Frederick George Waterhouse - will only be seen in Adelaide and Canberra. A total of 81 works were accepted into the prize this year and the NAA presents 25 winning and highly commended works.

The Waterhouse Art Prize is intriguing for its unique cross-occupation of museum, art, science and material culture territories. Artists are asked to present the natural world as they see it, and the prize is powerful in representing the visual arts as a valid voice in institutional discourse around conservation, biology, evolution and climate change.

The prize has made a very successful comeback from a two-year hiatus, having received feedback from artists participating in earlier rounds of the competition. The prize has been opened up to include all forms of media except for photography. The Waterhouse can be applauded for its willingness to transform itself and recognise that contemporary artists are increasingly cross-disciplinary and no longer bound by traditional mediums and categories. Prizes for emerging art and 'scientists’ choice' were also rolled out. The result is a hugely diverse number of works on display at the NAA, including painting, sculpture, glass, ceramics, found material, paper work, digital work and more.

Four artists from the Canberra region are featured in the line-up, with Dan Power receiving the prize in the emerging category for his ink work on a bull’s skull. Jenni Kemarre Martiniello, a local glass artist with a studio at Canberra Glassworks, was at the launch to describe the making of her work, Parachilna bicornual set. The complex pieces take their inspiration from the artist's father and his stories of trips to Parachilna in South Australia as a young man. He would describe the open fields of small flowers blooming in the springtime, reflected in the vibrant colours of the work. The work is detailed and layered to evoke the weave of the bicornual basket and takes around 20 hours to prepare. Locals Emilie Patteson and Elizabeth Kelly are also on show.

The Waterhouse Art Prize will be on display at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra until 13 November 2016.

Highly Commended: Jenni Kemarre Martiniello, Parachilna bicornual set, 2016, Hot blown glass with murrine; image courtesy the national archives of australia, canberra

Diverse Indigenous Voices Heard in US Exhibition; 'Everywhen'

Stephen Gilchrist, the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, in front of Vernon Ah Kee’s many lies (2004), during preparation for ‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia’, Harvard Art Museums, 2016; image courtesy and © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard University

‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia’ at the Harvard Art Museums is from Indigenous Australian curator Stephen Gilchrist. The Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the American museum brings together some 70 works from Australia that explore Indigenous conceptions of time, seasonality, performance and remembrance. The pieces are diverse, dating from the last 40 years, and the exhibition reflects on how the art historical landscape has shifted in its representation and understanding of Indigenous art. Artists on show include Vernon Ah Kee, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Doreen Reid Nakamarra, Rover Thomas, Christian Thompson and Judy Watson.

‘Everywhen’ is a term first used by Australian anthropologist William Stanner, and is an apt expression to describe an Indigenous perception of time as being layered and interconnected. This essential idea relies on active encounters between the ancestral and natural worlds, and is reflected in the exhibition's sentiment that ideas must evolve and shift; nothing can remain fixed.

The exhibition aims to present an Indigenous narrative that is not bound to the canon of colonial constructs. It invites the 40,000-plus years of Indigenous residence alongside those 228 years of European colonisation to share the exhibition space; Gilchrist is attempting to create an expansionary movement in understandings of Indigenous ways of being in the world.

Acknowledgment of country is performed within the exhibition, a largely foreign idea for American audiences: something Gilchrist calls an active process of ‘Indigenising’ a place. It is a political act of declaring to the world the sovereignty of Indigenous land, words and bodies. The impact of the show deepens in its placement on an American site, where a similar history of erasure has occurred.

The show closes 18 September 2016 for our friends and visitors in North America. For those not lucky enough to catch it, read our in-depth interview with Stephen Gilchrist by the historian Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll in our September issue, out now.

Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, exhibition view of the Seasonality-themed gallery, Harvard Art Museums, 2016; image courtesy and © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; photo: Harvard Art Museums

Your Own Piece of Parr!

MIKE PARR, THE WIND, 1993, EDITION OF 99, AU$850ETCHING, 54 X 39.8CM (SHEET); PRINTER: JOHN LOANE, VIRIDIAN PRESS, MELBOURNE

MIKE PARR, THE WIND, 1993, EDITION OF 99, AU$850

ETCHING, 54 X 39.8CM (SHEET); PRINTER: JOHN LOANE, VIRIDIAN PRESS, MELBOURNE

If you are visiting the Mike Parr exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, be sure to visit the NGA Store where you can purchase an edition of Art Monthly’s classic Mike Parr etching The Wind (1993). For this commission, Parr worked with master printmaker John Loane at Viridian Press, Melbourne. 'Mike Parr: Foreign Looking' is on display until 6 November 2016. 

Sneak Peek of Our September Issue!

WELCOME TO ISSUE 292

It was ten years ago, in May 2006, that John Mawurndjul made the cover of Time. I was then arts editor of the magazine’s South Pacific edition, and Australia’s master bark painter was one of eight artists selected for the Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Museé du quai Branly in Paris. Posed before the Eiffel Tower, sunglasses perched on his head, Mawurndjul radiated a relaxed and unmistakable star persona.

Still does. At Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) last month, when he won the Telstra Bark Painting Award at the 33rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), the senior Kuninjku artist from Central Arnhem Land was a natural magnet for journalists – myself included. ‘It’s a living water, an underground water,’ he told me, referring to the sacred presence within his winning work Dilebang (2016) – rendered in his signature rarrk crosshatching which, curator Hetti Perkins has noted, ‘infers the corporeality of the omnipresent Ancestral Being, Ngalyod’.

Dilebang, which features along with the artist on the front cover of this special Northern Territory focus edition, is Mawurndjul’s first completed painting in nearly five years. As MAGNT’s Curator of Aboriginal Art and Material Culture Luke Scholes writes in his article about the 2016 NATSIAA exhibition: ‘There is an overwhelming sense of hope that this painting and its recognition by the judges will signal the artist’s prolonged return to the broader Australian visual arts landscape.’ 

As Art Monthly went to press in early August, there was also great hope – and growing anxiety – concerning the future of Sydney’s art schools. In late July, the University of Sydney terminated its planned art-school merger with University of New South Wales Art & Design, coming only weeks after the resignation of Michael Snelling as director and chief executive officer of the National Art School, fuelling concerns about the future independence of these hallowed institutions within the broader arts landscape. We hope to report on further developments in October’s New South Wales focus edition. 

Michael Fitzgerald

Editor

Hope and Optimism from Art Collective WA

Trevor Vickers, Breakfast Variations, Projection, 2016; image courtesy sno contemporary art projects, Sydney

Given the current climate of Sydney's art scene - closures of TAFE and university art programs, changes to the city's most dynamic art schools, shrinking budgets for museum acquisitions and the challenges of attracting new patronage to commercial galleries - the current exhibition showing at Sydney Non Objective (SNO) in Marrickville is very timely. 

The exhibition comes from across the nation and is brought to us by Perth group Art Collective WA, who featured in Art Monthly's April WA focus edition. The situation Sydney finds itself in was similarly experienced on the west coast some four years ago. Galleries closed their doors in financial hardship and Perth artists were left to flounder. This prompted the birth of Art Collective WA, taking inspiration from Melbourne's artist initiative Pinacotheca. 

The four artists showing at SNO are all members of the collective that works to support established WA artists. Helen Smith, Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, Trevor Vickers and Jurek Wybraniec are internationally exhibiting abstract artists with studios based in Fremantle and Perth. The SNO show invites audiences to see each individual's exploration in minimal abstraction. 

Ultimately, the show, which runs until 28 August 2016, celebrates hope and renewal in times of adversity.

Helen Smith, Reunification Series # 70 , 2016, Found image assemblages; image courtesy the artist and SNO contemporary art projects, Sydney

Much-Anticipated Parr Survey Opens at the NGA

mike parr: foreign looking, exhibition view, national gallery of australia, canberra, 2016

Mike Parr is considered to be Australia's most significant practising performance artist. He established himself as a controversial and provocative artist in the early 1970s and was formative in the development of conceptual art in Australia. The retrospective, opening today in Canberra, features a range of media from the prolific artist, including film, print, drawing, sculpture and photography.

Experimenting with poetry and the written word in his early work, Parr then found performance to explore his interest in memory, the unconscious, self and the image of self. He ruthlessly pushes his body to extremes to achieve the 'limit state'. Works show him slicing his belly, starving himself in solitary confinement, pushing pin tacks into his leg and wrapping his head in wire, in an often uncompromising confrontation with his audience.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery has reconstructed the artist's 1974 'Information Centre', which will contain a large collection of archival material as well as a display of Parr's numerous journals, highlighting the artist's rigour in relentless self-analysis. It will also be a site for talks, workshops and performances throughout the exhibition, which runs until 6 November 2016.

Bronze liars (1996): parr constructed these portrait busts partially blinded

Information Centre is the site for early work as well as archival and reading material

NATSIAA Winner Announced!

Harold Joseph Thomas (Bundoo) with his work Tribal Abduction, overall winner of the 2016 Telstra Art Award

Tonight in the Top End, the 2016 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) was presented to Darwin artist Harold Thomas for his work Tribal abduction. The annual event has run since 1984, hosted by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin. Major sponsorship from Telstra has helped the continuing success of the award and a AU$50,000 cash prize for the winner. The awards celebrate the achievements and contribution of Indigenous artists across Australia: emerging or established, traditional or contemporary, and in all media. The judging panel that selected the winning works comprised artist Vernon Ah Kee, curator Kimberley Moulton and philanthropist Don Whyte.

The works of the 75 Telstra NATSIAA finalists, including this year's Work on Paper Award-winner Robert Pau and 2016 Bark Painting Award-recipient John Mawurndjul, will be exhibited at MAGNT until 30 October 2016.

Betty Kuntiwa Pumani with her work which won the Telstra General Painting Award

Nicole Monks and her performance piece, We are all animals, which won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (sponsored by Telstra) 

Two Stellar Exhibitions Open at Beaver Galleries

Detail of Storm from Mount Ainslie by Alicia Mozqueira; image courtesy the artist and beaver galleries, canberra

Canberra's largest and well-respected commercial gallery, Beaver Galleries, opened a double exhibition this week with 'Dawn and Dusk' from Alicia Mozqueira and 'Winter Drawings' from Lucienne Rickard.

Mozqueira is an emerging Canberra painter exploring the dark romanticism of the natural environment. The oil paintings in this series capture the richness of the ACT landscape in seasonal transition. The artist magnificently renders the qualities of light, air and sky with a tender hand and sublime colour. Mozqueira asks us to pause and absorb the heady beauty of our own environment.

Rickard is a Hobart-based artist who has refined her art-making to a meticulous method of graphite marking on drafting film. The repetitive process is executed with painstaking precision and results in vivid, textural works that command presence in the gallery space. Rickard deals with the interwoven themes of beauty, brutality, death and disintegration wrapped up with a fundamental reverence for living things.

Both artists are on show until 21 August 2016, and well worth feasting your eyes on.

Detail of Tribute by Lucienne RIckard; image courtesy the artist and beaver galleries, canberra

Speculating 'Imagined Worlds' at Melbourne's Town Hall Gallery

imagined worlds, Installation view; image courtesy Town Hall Gallery, melbourne

Located in the redeveloped Hawthorn Arts Centre in Melbourne, Town Hall Gallery's most recent exhibition, 'Imagined Worlds', smudges the lines between reality and the imagined. Exhibiting the work of nine established Australian artists, the show raises questions around what the imagined landscape can do for artists and viewers. The artworks explore dreamlike representations of place that compel and captivate, allowing the imagination to consider what life could be in these new worlds.

Curated by Mardi Nowak, artists comprise Kevin Chin, Ara Dolatian, Connor Grogan, Tony Lloyd, Andrew Mezei, Kate Shaw, Ben Taranto, Christie Torrington and Alice Wormald.

The intriguing speculations of 'Imagined Worlds' continue until 21 August 2016.

imagined worlds, Installation view; image courtesy Town Hall Gallery, melbourne

MPavilion 2016 Design and Writer Announced!

Model of MPavilion design by Bijoy Jain; image courtesy Studio Mumbai

Melbourne's MPavilion in Queen Victoria Gardens will again be transformed into a design and cultural hub later this year, from October through February. Bijoy Jain, of architecture firm Studio Mumbai, has been appointed to build the temporary pavilion by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, which will be home to a massive series of talks, workshops, performances and installations.

Jain is a leader in sustainable and ethical architecture and has been described as an architect who thinks like an artist. He explores ideas around the role of craft and the handmade in architecture and works alongside skilled artisans and craftspeople to construct his buildings. The Indian architect is interested in the human element of what he calls the concept of 'lore', when local techniques, materials, traditions and knowledge are passed on and shared. In engaging with 'lore', Jain hopes the pavilion to be a 'symbol of the elemental nature of communal structures ... a place of engagement, and a space to discover the essentials of the world and of oneself.'

The 12-metre-high building will be constructed from the most basic of materials: bamboo, earth, stone and rope, and will place the visitor at a point between earth, ground and sky. Once the program ends, the pavilion will be allowed to continue its legacy when it is moved to a permanent home in the city's vibrant architectural landscape.

And newsflash!: To coincide with the design's launch, Art Monthly has once again collaborated with MPavilion and the National Association for the Visual Arts to present the MPavilion/Art Monthly Writing Award of AU$3000. The award aims to support writers in the field of interdisciplinary practice within art and design. This year, Tess Maunder is the worthy recipient and will develop an essay to be published in the December 2016 issue of Art Monthly. Currently a Curatorial Collegiate for the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Maunder will also appear as part of the official MPavilion program. 

recipient of the MPavilion/Art Monthly Writing Award; image courtesy tess maunder

Incredible Craftsmanship in Takeyoshi Mitsui's Sublime 'Sense'

Japanese artist Takeyoshi Mitsui was invited to spend a six-week residency at Canberra Glassworks and his exhibition 'Sense' shows the results of his stay. Moving away from his background in production work, Mitsui is interested in how the closed vessel may stand as a representation of the summation of life. As this is his first Australian exhibition, Mitsui was also keen to explore how glass is perceived as an artform in Australia, in contrast to Japan where ceramics is considered the dominant medium.

Mitsui uses a method of blowing into moulds to achieve his immaculately crafted vessels. The artist is a recipient of the Arts ACT-supported Asialink reciprocal residency program run between Canberra Glassworks and Toyama Glass Studio in Japan. 

For those in Canberra, head down to the Kingston foreshore to check out these beauties before the show closes on July 25!

NGA Announces Summer Blockbuster, 'Versailles'

These mesdames and messieurs showED off the pomp and ceremony of the French court

These mesdames and messieurs showED off the pomp and ceremony of the French court

A harp player and a handful of frilly French aristocrats helped announce the summer blockbuster 'Versailles: Treasures From the Palace' at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Opening December 9, the exhibition will showcase the astonishing luxury of French high society with a number of personal items belonging to King Louis XIV-XVI and Marie Antoinette, lent by the the palace museum, Château de Versailles

Addresses were given by the French Ambassador Christophe Lecourtier, the President of the Versailles museum Catherine Pegard, and Director of the NGA Dr Gerard Vaughan. All three distinguished speakers reflected on the timeliness of the exhibition and the recent terror and political disquiet seen in France. The exhibition aims to celebrate what Versailles represents for France: strength, creativity, innovation. But Vaughan also promises a healthy dose of sex and passion to balance the politics. 

This will be an exhibition to book early; it's sure to seduce!

Gerard Vaughan, Beatrix Saule, Catherine Pegard, Andrew Barr and Christophe Lecourtier

Gerard Vaughan, Beatrix Saule, Catherine Pegard, Andrew Barr and Christophe Lecourtier