News
Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Sera Waters’ ‘Dazzleland’ and Kenny Pittock’s ‘Every Kind of Shape’.
Sera Waters is a South Australia-based artist, arts writer, and academic. Waters’ art practice is characterised by a darkly-stitched meticulousness. In particular, she specialises in blackwork, and revels in repetitiveness, pattern, and crafting. Waters’ embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian settler colonial histories, examining the home-making practices of women and her own genealogical ghostscapes.
In ‘Dazzleland’, Waters further examines her ancestral past: “My ancestors arrived in waves upon Australian shores attracted by the dazzle of this land: its sunshine, mineral booms, grassed open spaces, and new opportunities to build rich lives. In making their homes and living across Australia, particularly upon Kaurna and Bunganditj Country, many were implementers of colonising change, such as planning widespread drainage, laying bitumen, marking boundaries, mining, purveying merchandise, farming livestock, and clearing and covering land with non-native species. Evidence from their lives show they gave little consideration to the knowledge and carefully-balanced ecologies which had been operating in Australia for centuries. This exhibition looks at the repercussions upon regions which have been exploited, altered, and had the ‘dazzle’ removed without due care, and without knowledge of the specificities of Country. Through the works of ‘Dazzleland’ I am asking what it means to inherit this intergenerational blindness, as well how we go forward living in this dazzling aftermath, when today what shimmers most is the scorching heat beating upon a dry and damaged land.”
This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
–
Kenny Pittock is a Melbourne-based artist who employs humour and sentimentality to playfully respond to contemporary Australian culture, exploring the overlaps and boundaries between the public and the personal. Pittock works across a large range of mediums, including ceramics, drawing, text, and photography.
Kenny has exhibited across Australia and internationally, including at the Museum of Old and New Art, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the Monash University Museum of Art, Artspace in Sydney, and Galleria 291 in Rome, Italy. Pittock’s work is held in collections including the City of Melbourne State Collection and the Melbourne University Union Collection.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two incredible exhibitions on May 16!
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
James Darling and Lesley Forwood’s installation, Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe, is now showing as an Official Collateral Event at La Biennale di Venezia, presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe is grounded in the artists’ minimalist tradition; simple, strong, and with a magnetic power to engage the viewer. But ‘Living Rocks’ is a bold departure and a fundamentally ambitious project, achieved in collaboration with Jumpgate VR, Paul Stanhope, and the Australian String Quartet. Significant in both its investigation and presentation, the installation is an inspiring and immersive experience that connects the present day to the beginning of life on earth. Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe addresses the question: what was our planet three billion years ago?
The installation connects the present day to the beginning of life. It is a memory of our origin and a prophesy of our future.
James Darling
Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe has been selected as one of only 21 official collateral events of the Biennale Arte 2019 in Venice.
Curated by Dr Lisa Slade.
Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe
Magazzino del Sale (n. 5, Dorsoduro 262)
Exhibition runs until 24 November
Closed on Tuesday
Congratulations to Ildiko Kovacs and Richard Lewer, who have been selected as finalists in the 2019 Sir John Sulman Prize!
The Prize is presented by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, established within the terms of Sir John Sulman’s bequest, the prize was first awarded in 1936. The Sulman Prize is awarded for the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist.
Of the work, Kovacs says: “This painting comprises plywood covered with oil paint. I often use my hands to apply several layers of colour. I then draw into it with graphite and wax pencil. I work on the floor so I can press down onto the surface. This allows me to manoeuvre around the board as I improvise the form. The lines are webbed in the way they are drawn or scratched, appearing to have a primal quality that reminds me of scarification or Riji shell engravings.”
Of the work, Lewer says: “Last year was not a good year; I spent a lot of time in hospital with Dad who was very ill. One day I remember more vividly than the others. I’d returned to the ward for the afternoon and was watching Dad from the doorway when the doctor stood beside me and said, ‘We have grave concerns for your father’s health’. I made this work to process my reality and feelings, as deep and raw as they were.”
The winner will be announced May 10. Exhibition runs until June 30.
Congratulations to Sera Waters, who has been selected as a Finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize!
Held every two years, the Ramsay Art Prize invites submissions from Australian artists under 40 working in any medium.
Finalists will be exhibited in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia from May 25 to August 25, with the winner announced on May 24.
Through the generosity of the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, the winning work is acquired by AGSA.
isa Roet’s ten-metre-tall inflatable gorilla, Baboe, is now installed atop the Apeldoorn town hall in the Netherlands.
The artwork is modelled on Bao Bao, a gorilla who lives in Apenheul Primate Park, a revolutionary cageless conservation centre where over 70 species of apes and monkeys live and roam freely in the forest.
Baboe is a collaboration with Felipe Reynolds and Airena, and is on display for 8 months in Apeldoorn.
Ildiko Kovacs is featured in issue 44 of Artist Profile, on the occasion of her survey show The DNA of Colour, now showing at Orange Regional Gallery.
The survey looks at roughly the last ten years of Kovacs’ work (since the publication of a monograph accompanying her survey show in 2011 at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery) and one of the highlights will be the emergence of a new stream of expressive, curvilinear paintings with a strongly graphic character. Sunrise (2018) and Highly Strung (2018), for example, use paint on card with boldly gestural and linear graphite lines worked into a richly textured and layered surface. Yet there is a recursive quality to this new work which links it back to work from earlier years. It is as though the marks then have transmogrified, constantly evolving into new marks, taking on different meanings as they reincarnate.
Henri Matisse once commented that the significance of an artist was to be measured by the number of new signs he has introduced into the language. A sign is an image which embodies the meanings distilled from lived experience. So, it is apt that Kovacs should say of a survey that it is ‘the luxury of bringing together a history of what I’ve gone through and the relationships that have shifted’.
Certainly, the joy of a survey that works is to recognise a recursive character to the work, enabling the viewer to appreciate not so much a progression in an artist’s work, but rather an ever-deepening and enriching exploration of visual experience, the seeds of which were there right from the beginning.
Nana Ohnesorge’s No Picnic at Ngannelong is now showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
German-Australian artist Nana Ohnesorge was 21 years old when she saw Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock on German television. At the time, she was deeply affected by the power, spirituality, and mystery of country and its ancestors.
After moving to Australia, further research led to an understanding of significance of Hanging Rock (Ngannelong) as a site of deep spiritual significance for the Wurundjeri people and for the Taungurung and Dja dja wurrung peoples.
In No Picnic at Ngannelong, Ohnesorge presents Joan Lindsay, author of the 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, as the creator of a myth which has perpetuated through time and continues to draw visitors to the distinctive geological formation.
The cameo format of Ohnesorge’s works reflect the domestic Victorian interior of the Lindsay Family Sitting Room which is on view on the ground floor of the Gallery. The recreation the sitting room from the Lindsay’s family home Lisnacrieve in Creswick, was an initiative by Daryl Lindsay, a member of the famous, creative Creswick family.
Exhibition runs until August 4.
Ildiko Kovacs’ The DNA of Colour is now showing at Orange Regional Gallery. Curated by Sioux Garside, the exhibition will tour to the ANU Drill Hall Gallery after its run at Orange Regional Gallery.
In thinking about Kovacs’ abstract paintings I was struck by the resemblance of her spiralling lines to the coils of DNA. Her rippling forms seem to twist into a vortex or follow an unravelling double helix pattern. The DNA code is a metaphor for the way these paintings unfold and move with colour, sparked by an excavation of inner feelings and intuition…Rippling is a term that scientists used to describe the movement of gravitational waves first discovered as ‘ripples in the fabric of space-time’ by Albert Einstein in 1905–08.
Exhibition runs until June 18 at Orange Regional Gallery.
Purchase the beautiful cloth-bound, full-colour, 236-page publication here.
Hugo Michell Gallery is thrilled to announce South Australian collaboration, Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe has been selected as one of only 21 Official Collateral Events of the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2019.
Curated by Dr Lisa Slade, Living Rocks is a South Australian collaboration between James Darling & Lesley Forwood, Jumpgate VR, composer Paul Stanhope, and the Australian String Quartet. The Art Gallery of South Australia is the Official Promoter of Living Rocks.
Living Rocks, the only Australian project selected addresses the question: what was our planet three billion years ago? It celebrates the cosmic imperative of microbes in action through the universe, most notably their survival by way of the great events of extinction that have happened or are still to come on our planet.
In Living Rocks, water floods the Magazzini del Sale, the historic stone salt storehouses of Venice that have stood the test of many an inundation. From an extensive pool emerge thrombolites that have been crafted, not by unimaginable time and the force of nature, but by the artists who employ the distinctive roots of an arid land eucalypt to create living rocks.
“The installation connects the present day to the beginning of life. It is a memory of our origin and a prophesy of our future.” – JAMES DARLING
Show your support for this South Australian first with a donation to the project. Donations are tax deductible through the Australian Cultural Fund.
Trent Parke and Justine Varga are now showing in Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.
‘Defining Place/Space’ represents the current state of contemporary photography in Australia through the work of thirteen artists. The exhibiting artists were nominated by esteemed Australian curators of photography, and ultimately selected by MOPA’s Chief Curator Deborah Klochko.
Exhibition runs until September 22.
Showing: 211-220 of 331