The National

Kate Just in ‘The National’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
24
Mar

Kate Just in ‘The National’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Launching this Friday, featuring new work by Kate Just, The National 2021: New Australian Art is a celebration of contemporary Australian art. The final of three biennial survey exhibitions. Through ambitious new and commissioned projects, 39 artists feature across three venues, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Kate Just’s ‘Anonymous was a woman’, is an ongoing work that involves the repetitive production of hand knitted panels (16 x 16 inch) bearing the text ‘Anonymous was a woman.’ Stretched around canvas, each uniquely coloured work resembles a textile plaque. The muted tones of the work refer to a palette of jewels or minerals, natural or long buried treasures. Assembled on the wall in a grid, the works conjure a columbarium or monument to past lives or lost artworks.
The work is inspired by a quotation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928). In this feminist polemic, Woolf questions the ways women’s authorship has been judged as inferior to that of men, and systematically made invisible. Woolf says, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Over time this quote has been rephrased as “Throughout most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” Just states, “Through the making of the work, I meditate upon the immeasurable contributions that women have made to culture and society, and mourn the losses sustained by the erasure or exclusion of many of these gifts from the canon of art history.”
Pictured: Kate Just, ‘Anonymous was a woman (installation detail)’ 2019-21, knitted wool, 41 x 41 cm each panel.
Tony Garifalakis in ‘The National 2019: New Australian Art’
25
Aug

Tony Garifalakis in ‘The National 2019: New Australian Art’

The National 2019: New Australian Art will be launching the second of three ambitions survey exhibitions across multiple sites on March 29, 2019. The 2019 exhibition is curated by each venue comprising of AGNSW Curator of Photographs, Isobel Parker Philip; Carriageworks Senior Curator of Visual Arts, Daniel Mudie Cunningham; and MCA Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions, Clothilde Bullen alongside MCA Curator, Anna Davis.

As in its first year, the exhibition showcases new and commissioned work by contemporary Australian artists encompassing a diverse range of media including painting, video, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance. The National 2019 will continue the project’s curatorial ambitions as a large-scale survey of contemporary Australian art in the form of three distinct exhibitions that explore overlapping themes including hierarchy and power, dystopic futures, and ritual and improvisation.

Tony Garifalakis will exhibit at the Art Gallery of New South Wales alongside 23 other artists in an presentation that Isobel Parker Philip describes to “reveal how Australian artists are responding with subtlety and intensity to the times they live in, through artworks that are intricate, complex and often charged with a sense of precariousness.”

Art Gallery of New South Wales: 29 March – 21 July 2019
Carriageworks: 29 March – 23 June 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia: 29 March – 23 June 2019

For full details about The National visit here.