Indigenous Triennial Art Exhibition @ National Gallery of Australia

Till Sept 20th 2017

Plan to take a few hours or several visits if you want to take in this exhibition. The range and complexity of the works on show means it takes lots of time to engage with the abundant creativity.

There were grand explorations of traditional.arts from both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sources. They are joined to huge numbers or works of modern and technological styles of creations.

In the entry way to the NGA is a Rolls Royce painted in tradition art style. In the exhibition is a video of the artist driving that car and that activity brings together lots of remarkable visual traditional elements. The driver turns into a large area of red dust and by driving in various circles at high speed he digs up the red dirt creating patterns and a vast amount of red dust. The beauty and layered elements of the video production and were wonderful.

I will go back as we only had 90 minutes today. The exhibition is hard as it traverses complex territory of history, political comment, layered cultural interaction and many aspects of the underbelly of human society. I have included a few pics below but the only sensible thing to do with this exhibition is to go – it is free.

 

Paramor Prize – art and innovation 2017 @ Casula Powerhouse

18 Feb 2017 23 April 2017

Each year the Casula Powerhouse hold an exhibition of works that are named as finalists in the Paramor Prize. The prize isnamed in honour of a local artist and seems to focus on adventurous multi-modal art.  I love it because of the novelty and the way it challenges my thinking. Art is delivered via screens and other electronic devices, it emerges from sculptural and multi media approaches and there is still a representation of wall based two dimensional creations and all of it seems to stimulate and engage.

I do not put movies on this blog but I have included several samples of the varied art styles to give a sense of the exhibition.

Blaze 10 @ Canberra Contemporary Arts Space Braddon

The annual Blaze exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Arts Space has a fabulous collection of works again. The pics below show you the wonderful range and the website link gives the backgound info.

http://www.ccas.com.au/exhibitions/blaze-xi

Currents – Anna Madeleine @ Canberra Contemporary Arts Centre Braddon

9 Dec 2016 – 11 Feb 2017

The cube at Gorman House Braddon is a black box of a room that CCAS use to display digital, projected, luminous and other lit artworks. The blurb for this begins Currents consists of an interactive installation and a series of animations that explore the materiality of digital communication.

Anna Madeleine seeks to make visible important elements of our society that are invisible normally through her fragile flickering creations. I have a couple of phone pics below and the link to the very good online catalogue.

Digital Photographic Portrait Prize @ National Portrait Gallery

One of the fascinating annual events at the Portrait Gallery is the Digital Portrait Prize. This is a competition for portraits using short film and digital means or representing character. Each year the range is surprising. One this year is a shimmering piece of semi transparent fabric in which faces and parts of bodies, feet, hands and arms appear and disappear within the moving fabric. Beautiful and engaging. The winning portrait is a black and white film of a homeless man in the United States. To me the most beautiful feature in the exhibition was of a young man who is a world champion at unicycling. The portrait is filmed in the Fitters’ shed next to the Canberra Glasswork. The champion does a set of tricks that are filmed in low light sometimes in shallow water that create an engaging flow of beautiful energetic images.

Seven entries and all of them were delightful – I have included some stills below largely for my own reminders.

David Hockney – Current @ National Gallery of Victoria

November 11 2016 – March 13 2017

David Hockney has an exhibition of the last decade of his work in the temporary exhibition space at the National Gallery of Victoria. It is everything I hoped it would be and more. Most of the art was created on and Ipad in a package called Brushes. He has worked from that to then print his work in large multi panel works that area lmost life scale.

You enter the space with red walls and a wall paper like look of maybe a hundred artworks unframed and pinned abutting each other around the outside wall with four large pillars in the centre space that are bedecked with either large portrait layout flat screens of sets of Iphones on which annimations or sequences of his works are displayed.

The second room is a dsplay space on which a famous forest scene he painted is reproduced on all four walls that makes it look life size

There is a long almost palace like room again in a rich red and the walls are lined with portraits of people in David Hockney’s life. They were painted in three days each and there are 82 people done in the last three years.

The feature of this exhibition I loved the most and found almost enthralling were the stroke by stroke creations of artworks. On Flat screens in various places the Brushes app used to create the work can be set to replay te construction of the artwork andyou can sit there and watch as line upon line colour upon colour a final work of art is created as you watch. I found it lots of fun to stand and watch in wonder from some basic lines through to a highly detailed artwork that emerged.

Being from Canberra I have now stood for hours in front of David’s Grand Canyon in the National Galllery of Austrralia. I have seen several documentaries about various aspects of his work and was rapt to be able to spendtime with his most recent decade’s work.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/david-hockney/#exhi-tab-about

Erica Seccombe @ ANU School of Art Gallery

8-16 October 2016

This exhibition was part of the Graduate Exhibition series the ANU School of Art stages in their gallery each year. Erica Seccombe’s was a remarkable set of video creations in which in a dark room took the viewer into the beautiful world of microscopic living forms that transformed in front of your eyes combined with materials taken from the slow growing treescape of the Canberra Arboretum. Some of the images were so engrossing in their slow and beautiful movement it was hard to look away.

There are a couple of still shots below taken at the show. I hope I see more of her work.