Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry
Richard Bell, Megan Cope and Sancintya Mohini Simpson are exhibiting work in the 16th Sharjah Biennial. The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multi-vocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered. The exhibition will run until 15 June 2025. More information is available here. Image: Megan Cope, Kinyingarra Guwinyanba, Buhais Geological Park, Sharjah.
Catharcissism (save me make me keep me take me)
Catharcissism (save me make me keep me take me) dredges Katie Porter’s creative and written past to resuscitate and release words frozen on a hard-drive by the anxiety of sharing one’s creative production. Each of…
Dominic Byrne: Bust This Flesh Pit
“The body is our general medium for having a world.” ― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception Interdisciplinary art practice facilitates multiple forms of engagement. By expanding the boundaries of medium specificity the attention shifts from its…
Wandering, Wondering
We are taught to think of time as a resource, that we can manage and sort into useful allotments. We are taught to determine the value(s) of our actions, and how to categorise the various…
LANDSHAPES
IS ART NATURAL? The question concerning Art’s relation to Nature is one central to Aesthetics and is bound up with associated problems regarding subject formation, differentiation and freedom. Via F.W.J. Schelling’s 1807 lecture On The…
Dhana Merritt: DM Teahouse
Make a delicious bowl of tea: Lay out the wood charcoal to heat the water. Arrange the flowers as they are in the fields. In summer, evoke coolness; in winter, warmth. Anticipate the time for…
Made pink
“I am the self portrait of my father” – Saeed Jones It is important to inaugurate this piece of writing by mentioning that the artist’s father is a truck driver, specifically a transporter of tanked…
Marilyn Schneider: V.V.V.V.V.I.P.
Art fairs are a transient space for commercially motivated consumption. The material-semiotic messages transmitted by Marilyn Schneider’s sculptures and paintings communicate a complex interrelationship between architecture, the designed object, the art object, the environment and its inhabitants:…
Jordan Azcune: Raw Prawn
Dear Diary, Jordan Azcune’s object relations are familiarly uncommon. They negotiate actions of strapping, balancing, leaning, extending, buggering, blending, bending, shrouding, hanging, twisting, puncturing, spilling, stretching, strapping and tying. His assemblages emit and scramble the…
Taste with your eyes, see with your mouth
Elizabeth Willing’s Between Courses Eat to live, or live to eat? On one hand sustenance, and on the other pleasure. Food is undeniably necessary, located right at the very bottom of Maslow’s pyramid1 , but…
Parallel Park: Tandem
Holly Bates and Tayla Haggarty explore themes of gender, sexuality and representation in their respective practices. When working together as Parallel Park these concerns are amplified. Romantically involved, the collaboration combines their individual interests in…
PINKING. Decorative. Edge.
In an art world marked by big business sponsors and French champagne it is refreshing to see the kind of bottom–up show like PINKING. Held in residential West End, Cut Thumb gives an enthusiastic, share-house…
Jason Haggerty: BODYPOD
Sphereology noun. the study of the human need for interior space. On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind…
Private Places for Public Crying
Hello Possums! Caitlyn “Caity” Reynolds has made some art for you and asked me to write some words to go with it if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Maybe you’re looking at the…
Erin Groenenboom: Leave (Get Out)
But now there’s nowhere to hide Since you pushed my love aside I’m out of my head Hopelessly devoted to you Hopelessly devoted to you Hopelessly devoted to you [1] Performing is a natural and…
A Synthesis of Abstract Constructs
With an opening on 10 September 2015 at POP Gallery Woolloongabba, Indirect Response is a selection of new works by Simon Degroot PhD candidate at the Queensland College of Art. This exhibition is a chance for…
Direction Now
The ten artists in this exhibition have come together in a spirit of a mutual exploration of abstraction. Mostyn Bramley-Moore, Terri Brooks, Michael Cusack, Miles Hall, Anton Hart, Anthony T O’Carroll, Claire Primrose, Amanda Ryan,…
Jaden Gallagher: Happy End Problem
Interview between Llewellyn Millhouse and Jaden Gallagher L: Your work up until this project has been mostly sculptural installations, consisting of ready-made and everyday materials and relying on the physical quality or spatial experience of…
Makeshift Musings: A response to Makeshift Monuments
The spectacle is non-porous. It’s well oiled and frictionless. Like a water slide, which grates with annoying joins, it funnels movement. It’s plasticity knows no bounds. It acts on us and we on it. It…
Louise Bennett: All At Once
The bulk of human activity is the creation and movement of information. Twenty years ago the Internet used zero percent of human energy consumption. Today, the digital economy uses ten percent of the world’s total…
Rebecca Daynes: Sea is Lonely
A friend I spoke to soon after viewing Rebecca Daynes’ work suggested that there is something so intimate about sitting sans clothes in front of your own computer. The nudity is a metonym for just…
The murmur of surfaces
For a period in 1991 I became enchanted by a series of small, suspended copper wire constructions that were included in an exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. During the course of this exhibition I…
temporary spaces/ with suspicion
when you walk into a gallery space there’s a hierarchy of how to behave, sometimes it feels like that turns into a trajectory of how we are supposed to experience art, you have to see it…
Four Walls
Working closely on common themes to intertwine their visual poetry, Mulder and van Vuuren explore the incapturable essence of memory and experience through a connection to objects, images and the passing of time. There is…
Subject Line
5:49PM. The sun disappears below the horizon of the Gold Coast Highway and the neon signs flicker to life. The textual message is saturated with light. At a glance, we fail to see text, only…
Michelle Eskola - Räjäyttää
If one task of representation is to show us how the world looks, abstraction is free to do something else, and reflecting our sense of the world, rather than what’s otherwise visible to the naked eye – whether…
A Little Car Crazy
Despite a proud history, the place of the motorcar in Australia may well be at a turning point. In the current frenetic era of innovative technology and inbuilt obsolescence, many of the items we only…
Warren Palmer: Now and Then
I’ve watched Warren Palmer’s work since the 1970s. He is an artist who exemplifies that feeling we get that something is happening in our own backyard comparable in concept, style and quality to the latest…
Dog Show (wow. much wiki. so amaze.)
Dogs. Why a show on dogs? What kind of cues does a show centred around dogs send out? Too much potential for cuteness, the vernacular, the sentimental. Too much probability of strained humour – of…
Piet Noest: Chrome
Last year, when Piet Noest began a series of paintings in response to Kent Farbach’s compositions Chrome (1995) and Chrome II(2014), his goal was to visually express the dynamics of sound through line, form and colour. He…
2970Degrees – The Boiling Point
2970Degrees – The Boiling Point: Friday Now that the 2.5 days of explosive thought and action that was 2970Degrees – The Boiling Point has ended, I can breathe and process my thoughts into somewhat of…
The Conception Of Abstraction In Audio/Visual Installation: Appropriation, site specificity and reflexivity in the work of Jake Sun
There is no question that the contemporary subject navigates the world via mass-media and televisual representation. As Amelia Jones surmised, those born post-1960 are ‘conditioned on the deepest level by what we might call…
Base Perceptions
‘To learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them’ -Nicolas Bourriaud, 2002 “Select Reshape” examines the tension between technologically created images and…
PISSWRECK DESTINY
My Kind of Soldier Australia’s “Rum Rebellion” had almost nothing to do with rum. On the 26th of January 1808, exactly twenty years after the foundation of the Colony, Australia had its first and only…
Low Blow: The Myth of Man in the Paintings of Yannick Blattner
What is it that makes someone a fair dinkum, true blue, Aussie bloke? In Larrikins: A History, Brisbane based historian Melissa Bellanta posits that an understanding of larrikinism ‘unlocks the secret to Australian national Identity’.¹…
Facts, Fictions and Fabrications: The Work of Svenja Kratz
Between the 1840s and the 1860s, a rather curious artifact circulated sideshows and carnivals. The Fiji Mermaid, as it was titled, comprised of the mummified head and torso of a monkey, attached to the…
COLD SHOULDERED
In a city weeks after the snow filthy chunks of ice remain in the streets, in gutters and on freeway verges. Cars that have been parked for a number of months drive away leaving holes…