News

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Paul Sloan’s If it keeps on raining the levee’s gonna break and Pepai Jangala Carroll’s Ngayulu anu ngayuku mamaku ngurakutu, on Thursday, September 14 from 6pm.

In If it keeps on raining, the levee’s gonna break, Paul Sloan shatters the prison cells of space and time, creating new possibilities, surreal juxtapositions, and dissident commentaries. Sloan’s latest body of work exploits the inherently disruptive and non-linear potentials of collage, while cleverly traversing the realms of drawing and printmaking.

Representing more than 3 years of extended exploration, these works play into a rich field of practice that was established in the twentieth century by heavy-hitting luminaries such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Hannah Hoch, and Richard Hamilton. In these large-scale works, Sloan creates new spaces for contemplation. He invites unexpected things, people, and events to coalesce, allowing juxtapositions and commentaries to arise that are sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, yet always profoundly subversive and aesthetically powerful.

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In Pepai Jangala Carroll’s new body of work, Ngayulu anu ngayuku mamaku ngurakutu, the artist has retraced his father’s story, reconnecting with his homeland. Translating as ‘I went home to my father’s country’, the exhibition summons notions of personal heritage and belonging. Carroll travelled back to his custodial country in April 2017, having left this region as a 19-year-old after his parents passed away. Pepai has spent the last 40 years living and working in Ernabella. On this recent trip he travelled with fellow Ernabella artist Derek Jungarrayi Thompson to visit sites between Kintore, Kiwirrkura, and Lake Mackay (Wilkinkarra). Concerned with passing on this new knowledge and experience, the results are profound and sensitive.

“I’ve gone home! I’ve followed my father’s footsteps back to his country to Ilpili, Walungurru, Ininti, Kiwirrkura, Wilkinkarra and Yumari. Now I’m going to tell that tjukurpa. It’s a big one!”

TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art

Please join us in celebrating these two brilliant exhibitions on September 14!

Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Fiona McMonagle to our represented artists!

Fiona McMonagle completed her studies in 2000 at the Victorian College of the Arts and has since been engaged in international residencies and exhibitions nationally. Her practice has a grounding in watercolours but her understanding of the medium and form has extended to include moving image and installation. Painting the figure, McMonagle draws inspiration from her suburban upbringing, challenging and celebrating the moments we take for granted.

McMonagle was selected as a finalist in the 2014 and 2016, Basil Sellers Art Prize, and was the winner of the invitation-only, National Self Portrait Prize in 2015. In 2010 she undertook a residency at the Australia Council for the Arts Studio in London.

Selected exhibitions include, Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2016); Luminous: 100 years of watercolour, National Gallery of Victoria (2016); Self Conscious: Contemporary Portraiture, Monash University Museum of Art (2012); Beleura National Works on Paper and Gaze, Redland Art Gallery, Queensland (2010) amongst others.

Her works are held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, The National Portrait Gallery, Artbank and various university and regional galleries.

We congratulate Fiona on all her achievements and we are thrilled to be working together in the future.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of our SALA exhibitions; Narelle Autio & Trent Parke’s The Seventh Wave and Philjames’ The Lite Ages, on Thursday, August 3 from 6pm!

First exhibited in 2000, The Seventh Wave is a collaborative exhibition by acclaimed photographers Narelle Autio and partner Trent Parke.

Penetrating the sea’s surface, they got under a nation’s skin. Their pictures catch Australians’ infinite patience in waiting for the next wave; their fearlessness in diving into the tumultuous swell; their blithe spirit in that final flick of the hair.
– Michael Fitzgerald

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In his latest body of work, The Lite Ages, Philjames continues to intervene directly on vintage reproductions of traditional paintings with playful outcomes. Philjames presents the works as genuine artefact and elevates the status of pop culture comics such as The Simpsons and Mickey Mouse to historical significance. Humorous, entertaining and executed with faithfulness, The Lite Ages reveals the artist’s imagination and mischief.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions on August 3!

Congratulations to Justine Varga, Winner of the 2017 Olive Cotton Award! The Olive Cotton Award for photographic portraiture is a $20,000 biennial national award for excellence in photographic portraiture, dedicated to the memory of photographer Olive Cotton. Varga’s winning piece, Maternal Line, will also be acquired for the Tweed Regional Gallery collection.

Varga creates photographic works from an intimate exchange between a strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Employing analogue techniques, sometimes using a camera and sometimes not, her exposures capture instantaneous moments or distill lengthy durational periods. In this portrait, Varga has imprinted directly on the negative, in collaboration with her maternal grandmother.

Award Judge Dr Shaune Lakin the Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia stated:

“While Justine’s work is very contemporary, she’s also deeply interested in the history of photography. It’s a very complex photographic portrait: it made me think a lot about the act of the making a portrait – about what it means today to make a photograph of someone else, even if in the end it doesn’t reveal what they look like. But photography has never just been about appearance. It’s also been part of the way that we experience things like memory and relationships. The image – a series of scrawls made by the artist’s grandmother directly onto a piece of film – has been printed at monumental scale. It’s a very moving portrait of the artist’s relationship with and love for her grandmother.”

Exhibition runs until October 8 at Tweed Regional Gallery.

Full media release here.

Congratulations to Richard Lewer, who has been selected as a Finalist in the 2017 Archibald Prize, and to William Mackinnon, who is a Finalist in the 2017 Wynne Prize!

Richard Lewer FINALIST in 2017 Archibald Prize

Elizabeth Laverty and her late husband Colin were among the first art collectors to travel the country and stay in remote Aboriginal communities, to visit the art centres, and to meet the artists whose work they were falling in love with. Over several decades, they built one of Australia’s best collections of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and worked tirelessly to raise money for community health and recreational facilities.

Over several decades, they built one of Australia’s best collections of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and worked tirelessly to raise money for community health and recreational facilities.

“I didn’t know any of this when I first met Liz, a year after Colin’s death. Prompted by my animation depicting a tragic love story about an elderly couple, we launched into a long conversation about life, love, and death. It was easy to feel an instant rapport with Liz – a fellow red-head – because she is a warm, passionate, humble woman,” says Richard Lewer. “I remember when I asked Liz if I could paint her portrait, her first response was, “Why would you want to paint me, what have I done?””

William Mackinnon FINALIST in 2017 Wynne Prize

“I call my work psychological landscapes. In a way, the roads and houses are always something more than just roads and houses. The cracks, drains, shadows rips, and glitter are stand-ins for emotional states, or symbolic of greater themes of life. I am interested in communicating what it feels like to be in our world in this time. The more personal I seem to make my paintings, the more they connect with others.”

The 2017 Wynne Prize, for the best landscape painting of Australian scenery or figure sculpture, will be awarded on the evening of July 28. Exhibition runs from July 29 to October 22 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Exhibition runs from July 29 to October 22 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Winner will be announced on the evening of July 28.

Congratulations to James Dodd and William Mackinnon, who have both been selected as Finalists in the inaugural Hadley’s Art Prize, Hobart! Australia’s richest landscape prize, it is an acquisitive prize valued at $100,000. Held annually to celebrate painting, printing and drawing, the Prize aims to reconnect with the history of art exhibitions at the Hadley’s Orient Hotel, which was built in 1834.

The 2017 theme is History and Place; the Prize will be awarded to the best portrayal of the Australian landscape which acknowledges the past.

Exhibition opens July 14, where the Winner will be announced. The exhibition will run from July 15 through August.

Country Arts South Australia has partnered with numerous regional galleries to present Shed Wizard, a touring exhibition by James Dodd. In partnership with Tatiara District Council, Shed Wizard will launch at Walkway Gallery in Bordertown on Saturday, July 1, and will run until August 26. Dodd will exhibit his Painting Mill project as part of the touring exhibition, with a demonstration at Walkway Gallery at 11am on July 2.

This exhibition presents a range of recent outcomes from James Dodd’s exploratory practice. Dodd is an artist who celebrates cultures of DIY and life-hacking, a result of his upbringing in the ‘make-do’ context of an agricultural childhood.

Dodd applies radical curiosity and invention to investigations of public space, and plays with the idea of fantastic tools and the backyard as in important place to make art. A sense of adaptation and hybrid invention is especially present in his recent bicycle sculptures and art-machines.

Having spent a large period of time immersed in Australia’s street art movement of the early noughties, Dodd pursues a practice that borrows graffiti for gallery outcomes, and hijacks conceptual pursuits for application at the edges of society.

In Shed Wizard, Dodd presents vivid paintings, unusual bicycles, strange machines, and candid videos. The exhibition brings this range of objects together to examine Dodd’s trajectory over the past decade or so, and examines ongoing themes such as notions of social and political resistance, adventure and risk, and the hand-made contraption as a magical art device.

Shed Wizard tours to the following galleries on the following dates:

• Walkway Gallery, Bordertown, from July 1 to August 26

Launching at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art on Thursday, June 29, The Summation of Force is a collaborative multimedia installation by South Australian artist duo Trent Parke and Narelle Autio.

In their creative collaboration The Summation of Force, Parke and Autio turn their gaze to the possibilities of filmic narrative, and look to family and sport for subject material.

A multi-channel video work that pitches competitive sport and the mythical power of cricket as a metaphor for life and parenthood, The Summation of Force is no less than a Lynchian suburban dreamscape. It is a paean to collective dreams, youthful determination, and the bonds that sporting ambition can create both within families and nations.   

The Summation of Force by Trent Parke and Narelle Autio has been produced in association with Closer Productions and the Adelaide Film Festival, and is presented by the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for the 2017 SALA Festival.

Exhibition runs from June 30 to September 1. Head here for more information.

Press:

• Press release: The Summation of Force bowls into Samstag
• Art Guide: Trent Parke and Narelle Autio: The Summation of Force
• The Australian: Summation of Force pushes the boundaries of bat and ball
• ABC Radio: Photographer couple explores the evolution of cricket
• Arts Hub: Surprise! Arts sector to challenge screen world in Hive #4
• UniSA Alumni News: Narelle Autio