The corridor space at M16 Artspace is currently home to a set of great dark creations by Emma Le Strange. The art works are of bodies emerging out of darkness into low light in a colour palette that reminds me of painting on dark velvet. The paintings are attractive and I have included flyer, gallery sheet and sample pics.
Black and white is often a powerful approach in art. Tony Dalla Venezia has created a fabulous set of works that to me reflect some Polynesian styles of visual representation. Some are simply titled, fish bat.or horse and that is appropriate because that is what is rendered in the fabulous detailed black and white ink and charcoal creations.
Below are a few pics and a gallery sheet for you to get a sense of this artists
Another great mix of art and artists is on at M16 in Griffith.Tied together with a thought of wandering the artists represent experience in a great range of ways.I have attached below eight pictures in order of the following artists followed by the gallery sheet that gives the details of their work and others in the exhibition
Annika Harding
Kate Barker
Amy Dunn
Jacklyn Peters
Jonathan Webster
Fiona Veikkanen
Elena Papanikolakis
Alexander Boynes
Sue Lovegrove creates paintings out of her love of nature. They are cheerful, abound with natural colours and are interwoven with elements that give a sense of nests. Blue and brown are the dominant colours. I have included a set of pics and
One of the current exhibitions at Beaver Galleries in Deakin features the wonderful native plant decorated ceramic useful objects produced by Fiona Hiscock. The exhibition theme is Coast. Her art lets her create useful things and also express her delight in telling a story of the wonderful plants and animals she sees in the Banksia forests near her. There is a sense of fun in many of the items and all of them look genuinely useful.
Pics and a gallery sheet below.
I love curators! As I walk through many of the great exhibitions of history and creative arts that I go to I am often struck with great thankfulness toward the work done to bring what is on show together.The Atua exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia has brought objects of rare beauty and historical and cultural significance from at least 25 major institutions on several continents.
Let me gush a bit about this set of artifacts. The first thing I loved were the maps. As you went from space to space the curators had clustered works around specific cultures linked to particular Pacific Islands. My geographical familiarity with those Islands is weak. So having a couple of large maps and repeated small maps as you moved from cultural group to cultural group. The second thing I loved was the clarity of the text panels. When you move from one cluster to another one you always have a brief explanation of the groups of objects and then some crisp explanation of each object. Not tiring but very informative.The third thing I loved was the placement of the objects largely in the middle of the room. It is great to be able to walk around and get close ups of all sides of these truly remarkable objects of wood and other natural materials.
I love going to exhibitions that merge history, religion and creativity. This nails all three in a big way. The text briefly explains the wonderful history of the long distance migrations and the inter-island connections over millennia. The place that many of the objects play in the religion of these many islands was remarkable. The raw creativity woven into the largely wooden objects never stops having that awe filling effect. The range of institutions was wonderful but I was also rapt to see one of the objects was loaned from David Attenborough.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and sadly the National Gallery has its extreme policy on photographs so I can only include one of their ads below. Their website has a few good pics and some good info and there is a face book link and a SMH article link below.
One of the spaces at the National Gallery of Australia that I have grown to love is the part that is called Photospace. It is just a long wall near the theatre and hidden behind the costume cases on your way down to the temporary exhibition space.The change over the exhibitions regularly and the adventurous and creative range they display is very stimulating
The current set on the wall is called ‘Finding your place in the world’ Asian photomedia. It features a collection of artists working in various photomedia and each of them engage the eye in a different way. To me the thing that I could not look away from was a video created by F X Horsono of a man of Chinese Indonesian heritage painting his name in painted Chinese calligraphy on a glass screen until rain comes and washes his identity away. The man continues to paint and the rain keeps washing his name away. (I love artworks that get your mind going for hours afterwards in the ramifications and application of what an artist is doing- this one did that for me.)Website
http://nga.gov.au/PHOTOSPACE/Default.cfm
Youtube clip of the mentione Horsono
The Youth Art Prize sponsored by Rotary has its exhibition on at The Tuggerenong Arts Centre. There are around 40 works on display ranging through paintings, sculptures photographs and other media. I love the three part skateboard one and I have included a set of pics to give a sense of the range. The last one is the delightful winner.
The two artists on show at the Manuka Canberra Contemporary Art Space have a great difference in approach. Stasce has hard objects made of metal and wood that invite you to engage with. There are gears and hinges and so on – it is a very hard set of works. Lander’s paintings celebrate urban deconstruction through portrayal of demolished and un-redeveloped spaces. One of them I loved was ‘Entrance’ which focuses on a delapidated set of steps that used to lead from the pavement up to the hotel at Jamison Centre. (That site is still un-redeveloped.) The works of both artists are well worth the visit.
Here are some camera pics.
I love surprises. Darroch’s Suntrap is a marvelous surprise. I have seen lots of suntraps in lots of windows over the years and they are engaging and often quite beautiful in their own rustic way. The Darroch work in that glass enclosure on Civic Square at the Canberra Museum and Gallery is first of all enormous. The surprising side is that this artwork is made up of those vicious metal rabbit traps. The artist has painted them yellow orange and red and arranged them in a beautiful wheel like pattern. Such happy beautiful artwork made out of some brutal cold metal killing traps.
Here is a facebook post on it that gives you a good look at it.
stephenrrandall 