Tag Archive "australia"

Nigel Helyer Resurrects the Past in Sydney

Every day at one o’clock, a locomotive, heard but not seen, makes its way through the lobby of CarriageWorks, an old Sydney rail yard recently transformed into a performing arts center. The sound sculpture by Nigel Helyer, called GhosTrain, haunts the space it runs through. While the installation presented by Performance Space only sounds for 90 seconds, the complexities implied by the work encourage thoughtful engagement with the ideas of sound and history implied by its reference to acoustic ecology and the idea of a soundmark.

Fiona Tan in Sydney

I experienced Fiona Tan’s work over two days – not because it was an extended durational work but because her show, Coming Home, was being presented at both the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the National Art School Gallery. The fact that the experience of the video works was a journey was the perfect mode of experiential presentation of a work that itself explores the idea of journey and its representation through time.

Melanie Boreham in Sydney

When I entered the solo show of Melanie Boreham at Hardware Gallery, I entered a forest. Suspended from different heights from the ceiling were forty bonsai-sized trees. These floating trees captivated me immediately because of their defiance of gravity, floating in a dream-like constellation. But the trees captivated me more because they were woven and constructed out of human hair.

A Celebration of the Visual Arts: Art Month Sydney

On a cool overcast March morning, I navigated the streets of the heavily residential Elizabeth Bay neighborhood to find Michael Reid’s gallery and talk to the owner about his role as co-creator (with Vasili Kaliman of Kaliman Gallery) of Art Month Sydney. The initiative, now in its first year, celebrates the visual arts in Sydney over the whole month of March, bringing together over 70 galleries, ARIs (Artist-Run Initiatives) and other organizations to host over 140 events. It is a feast, it is a celebration, it is an incredible force of art.

Scott Elk in Sydney

Billowing on banners, printed on posters and featured in multiple venues around Sydney, the artwork of Scott Elk is enjoying great exposure, and for good reason. The Sydney-born artist’s illustrations mix media from photography to screen prints, from design elements to typography. The modern amalgams instantly come across as multi-layered works reflecting a depth of thought and artistic practice. Whether exploring issues of queer identity or playing with variations in typography, Scott Elk represents a leading voice in queer art through his powerful and evocative work.

Showcasing Talent at the Australian Centre for Photography

Since I arrived in Sydney, arts-minded people of all walks of life have been pointing me towards the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP). For over 37 years, the ACP has been exhibiting works of both Australian and international photographers. My expectations were thus set reasonably high when I visited for the first time, for the opening of their current shows. The simple modern spaces were impressive and fertile ground for exhibiting artistic talent. While I could sense the talent in a few photographers on exhibition, shortcomings in production, in one case, and in curation, in the other, left me feeling ...

Retelling Histories at Artspace in Sydney

Since the early 1980s, Artspace Visual Arts Centre has established itself as a centre for residency-based contemporary installation art both by Australian and international artists. The three installations currently on display at Artspace only reinforces that fact. Each of the works serves as a rich deconstruction of history, exposing multiple layers of events past. With complex stories from Australia, Brazil, Canada and beyond, Artspace’s current offerings deserve full attention and complete immersion. The experience presents pathways of historical reinterpretation worthy of consideration.

Words, art, computer games! Australia checks in.

In the annals of self-promotion of a good kind, this info came in from a reader named Jason Nelson, who’s a digital art professor in Australia. He is the author of a number of internet games–at which I am rather inept, it taking me about seven tries to figure out how to get out of a hole and then a similar number of tries to figure out that I can use a similar maneuver to get on an elevator–that are also art. The one I tried has a Mark Lombardi conspiracy theory quality, with spidery lines and crazy text, all ...