ANNE ZAHALKA AT HAWTHORN ARTS CENTRE

ANNE ZAHALKA's work is included in You Are Here - a new exhibition of landscape photography at Town Hall Gallery, Boroondara. 

Anne Zahalka, A Quite Day at Spring Creek, 2017, pigment ink on rag paper, 26.4 x 34.8 cm

For the First Peoples of Australia, who have inhabited this country for over 60,000 years, and for those more recently arrived, our relationship with the Australian landscape is defined by both a deep cultural belonging and a history of conflict and displacement. Expanding on the longstanding tradition of landscape photography, this exhibition centres on each of the artists’ connection and disconnection to country. The works deconstruct how we occupy the land and explore ideas of home and identity within the environment informed by cultural, personal and historical narratives.

Anne's included works are from her The Landscape Revisited series (2017) in which she creates photomontages based on early Australian paintings from the Heidelberg School that seek to rewrite colonial narratives and construct a less Anglo-centric image of Australia. 

This exhibition is part of the PHOTO2020 program and runs 12 March - 10 May. 

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JACKY REDGATE AT GEELONG GALLERY

Jacky Redgate, HOLD ON #4, 2019-20, pigment ink on fabric, 197 x 203 cm

JACKY REDGATE - HOLD ON opens this Saturday 7 March at Geelong Gallery. This major solo exhibition coincides with PHOTO2020, the International Festival of Photography. 

Jacky Redgate—HOLD ON will present the most recent iteration of Redgate's mirror work in its entirety that reflects how, while continuing to make her experimental ‘hybrid' mirror works over the past ten years, Redgate has been recalling and introducing into her work the autobiographical images and subjects of her juvenilia. Embodying a cathexis on emotionally laden subjects, these photographs tease with a combination of abstraction and autobiographical mirroring that seemingly contradicts the Cartesian sobriety of her well known ‘impersonal’ works.

The exhibition runs until 17 May. 

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GUAN WEI AT CASULA POWERHOUSE

GUAN WEI has co-curated Pulse of the Dragon at Casula Powerhouse. His immense work from 2017 Cosmotheoria is featured in the exhibition.

Pulse of the Dragon is an exhibition emphasising themes of religious witchcraft, mythology, folk art and folk culture as methods for opening up understandings and perspectives of Chinese culture. It features a dynamic line-up of Chinese and Chinese-Australian artists who approach these concepts from their local and international perspectives. 

The exhibition continues until 19 April.

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Guan Wei, Cosmotheoria, 2017, acrylic on linen, 282 x 750cm, (1-42 panels, 6cm gap between each panel)

JANET LAURENCE TAPESTRY COMMISSION

The Australian Tapestry Workshop is working on a private commission to weave JANET LAURENCE's work 'Plant Song'. The original design by Laurence is a composite digital image created with her extensive archive of images of plants. The ATW weavers have selected a wide palette of lush greens to create this tapestry, including a high ratio of cotton yarns which are used to create areas of luminosity in the tapestry. 

Janet stopped by the workshop to check on the progress and was very taken with the work! You too can see this tapestry being woven during opening hours of the workshop: 10am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday. 

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Images: Work in progress 'Plant Song', 2020, designed by Janet Laurence, woven by Chris Cochius, Sue Batten, Amy Cornall and Cheryl Thornton. 

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP AT THE AGNSW

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP are featured in the exhibition Shadow Catchers, opening today at the AGNSW. This exhibition investigates the ways shadows, body doubles and mirrors haunt our understanding of photography and the moving image.

Eugenia's Diglossia (2009) series is on display, along with Julie’s Body Double (2007).

The exhibition runs until 17 May.

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PETER CALLAS IN SURVEY OF AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART

PETER CALLAS is featured in Cognitive Dissidents: Reasons to be Cheerful, now open at Griffith University Art Museum. The exhibition examines the experimental practices central to the development of the video medium in Australian from the 1970s to the 1990s.

"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Callas' work was often cited as a paradigm case of 'postmodern aesthetics' whereby video and digital technologies provided a means for the rapid, freewheeling interrelation of all kinds of imagery; this was supposedly aid and abet the developments of that shrinking, borderless, increasingly multicultural, globe. And it's easy to see how Callas' videos embody this potential, as they set in train elements drawn from various cultures, side-by-side, overlapping, fast and furious throbbing montage. Callas himself cites Japanese advertising as the protean form of this burgeoning aesthetic..."

- Stuart Koop, 2002

The exhibition continues until 9 April. 

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GUAN WEI: A CASE STUDY

Guan Wei, Salvation No.1, 2015, bronze, 33 x 19 x 32 cm

The MAC (Museum of Art & Culture Lake Macquarie) has just opened Guan Wei: A Case Study - an exhibition of Guan Wei's work with an accompanying case-study publication geared specifically towards Year 12 Visual Arts students. 

The exhibition runs until 5 April. 

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DANI MARTI AT MUSAC

Dani Marti, The Stamp Collector [cropped video still], 2007, video 6’40min

DANI MARTI's work The Stamp Collector is part of the exhibition Five itineraries with a point of view at MUSAC (Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León). This exhibition celebrates the 15th anniversary of MUSAC and explores five themes that have guided the museum's acquisitions and programming since 2013.

In this video work we see a close-up of a man in a leather suit engaging in a chat exchange. The character remains anonymous - we hear only the sound of the keyboard and see the screen reflected in his glasses. Conflating the genres of portraiture and social documentary, the work displays many of the defining features on Marti's video practice - constrained scale, focus on the body and an intense concentration on an everyday scenario. "I call them portraits as a starting point, as a reference...but these portraits go beyond the person being portrayed - the individuals are just vehicles for something else. It is a search for some kind of abstraction, or maybe you could call it emotion," says Marti.

The exhibition at MUSAC runs until 7 June. 

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EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS WORK IN VENICE

Eugenia Raskopoulos, Rootreroot [video still], 2016, HD digital video, single channel, colour, stereo, 8:45 min;

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS is exhibiting 'Rootreroot' in 'The Body Language', an international exhibition at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space in Venice. 

In this video work, the artist is filmed from above as she drags an olive tree clockwise is the upper section, and a wattle tree anticlockwise below. Where the circles fleetingly intersect, we glimpse a moment of completeness between Raskopoulos' Greek & Australian identities. "Whether gestures are recorded or photographed, my body becomes a means for mark-making during performative acts that involve translation, transformation and fragmentation," says the artist. 

The exhibition continues until 12 March.

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PAT BRASSINGTON AT MGA

Pat Brassington, Untitled VII , 1980–2002, printed 2010, pigment ink-jet print, 370 x 249 mm

PAT BRASSINGTON has three works featured in the exhibition Dressing up: clothing and camera, closing soon at the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA).

This exhibition draws together photographs from the MGA collection that feature dress or clothing as a significant element in their making

The exhibition will close this Sunday 9 February.

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PETER DAVERINGTON COMPLETES MURAL IN SOUTH MELBOURNE

PETER DAVERINGTON has completed a large-scale mural at South Melbourne Primary School, the first public vertical school in Victoria.

Featuring an Australian landscape of banksias and verdant growth interrupted by geometric, hard-edge line work continued from the building's facade, the mural will be enjoyed by students for years to come.

Watch Peter at work in the footage captured by Danny Ronin here.

Peter Daverington, Coxsakie mural, 2019, South Melbourne Primary School, Victoria.

JOHN YOUNG AWARDED ORDER OF AUSTRALIA

A huge congratulations to JOHN YOUNG AM, who last week became a member of the Order of Australia. John has been recognised for his significant service to the visual arts, and as a role model.

Since his first exhibition in 1979, Young has had more than 70 solo exhibitions and over 160 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He has devoted a large part of his four-decade career towards regional development in Asia, and recently focused his work on transcultural humanitarianism. Young was seminal in establishing the Asian Australian Artists’ Association (Gallery 4A) in 1995, now 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where he has been a board member since 2009. Young was also a lecturer in painting at University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts has undertaken residencies and fellowships with the Australia Council for the Arts and is a trustee of McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery.

As evidenced by the career highlights above, this is truely a well-deserved achievement. Congratulations John!

ART AUCTION FOR BUSHFIRE RELIEF

ARC ONE artists JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, NIKE SAVVAS and ANNE ZAHALKA are among sixty leading contemporary artists who are working in solidarity to raise funds for the Australian bushfire crisis.

On Wednesday 12 February, the National Art School will host a silent art auction event. Raised funds will be donated to nominated charities The Climate Council, Firesticks Alliance Network and WWF Australia.

The artworks for sale can be previewed now via the Home Bushfire Relief website.

Live auction on 12 February from 7-10pm. Register your attendance here!