JANET LAURENCE 'DO IT' - KALDOR PUBLIC ART PROJECT 36

JANET LAURENCE is a contributing artist to Kaldor Public Art Project 36:  do it (australia).

do it (around the world) is a new chapter of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s exhibition-in-progress, which for 27 years has tapped creative luminaries to share simple instructions for their audiences to make an artwork themselves.

Hans Ulrich Obrist initiated do it in Paris in 1993 with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, gathering recipes for artworks from twelve artists. Since then, it has grown into a global collective art project including some of the world’s most famous figures.

In this time of global lockdown, do it (around the world) has artists making brand new instructions for people to do at home. "I’m encouraging people to have a conversation with a plant and begin to imagine the answers," says Laurence.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

do it (australia) is presented in partnership with Serpentine Galleries, Independent Curators International (ICI) & Google Arts & Culture, and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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DANI MARTI AT UNSW GALLERIES

Dani Marti, The Pleasure Chest, 2015, second hand necklaces and beads on powder coated aluminium frame, 255 x 170 x 12cm

DANI MARTI’s work is on display at UNSW Galleries in ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ - a new exhibition exploring queer kinship and forms of being together. Presented across the entire gallery and online, this major project seeks to foreground the way LGBTQI+ communities create alternative networks of support through various creative and resourceful means.

Marti is showing two works: a two channel video work, Notes for Bob (2012-14), and a woven necklace wall sculpture The Pleasure Chest (2015). These are prime examples of the seemingly stark division between Marti’s work as a painter/weaver, and a film-maker whose subjects probe the sexual lives of others.

Morgan Falconer says of Marti’s oeuvre, “Marti’s painting-objects are metaphorical, his films are allegorical: both use one thing to describe another. Beads describe their wearer; tales of sex describe a life with or without love. Marti doesn’t pretend to offer up the whole, essential individual to our gaze. Indeed, his work insists on the fact that identity is not a stable essence that can be recognised and captured again and again; instead it is something performed, and it changes each time in the performance.”

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INSIDE 'YOU ARE HERE' AT TOWN HALL GALLERY

Sadly the exhibition You Are Here, featuring new work by ANNE ZAHALKA, had to close early at Town Hall Gallery. One of the works on display was You Are On Gundungurra Land!.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Anne Zahlaka, You Are On Gundungurra Land!, 2020, Archival pigment ink print on rag paper, 115cm x 161cm

Using negatives taken over 20 years ago for her Leisureland series, Zahlaka has scanned and digitally manipulated this landscape to conform with an early painting by Conrad Martens depicting the Jamison Valley and Gully with a group of Aboriginal people gathering around a small fire on an unlikely outcrop.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Zahalka comments on the dichotomy between European visions of the picturesque, and the spirituality of place for indigenous peoples. 

The idyllic vistas of the Blue Mountains are nowadays framed by windows, set apart by safety railings, and surveyed from viewing platforms and gondolas high above the landscape. It is not a place to venture into, but rather to look at from a distance. But the Gully is an important spiritual site for the Gundungurra and Darug people who have lived in this region for over 40,000 years. 

Zahalka seeks to bear witness and acknowledge the Indigenous people to whom these lands have always belonged and lament the lack of care we have shown for this country.

You can now see the install photography and download the exhibition catalogue here.

JANET LAURENCE IN VOGUE LIVING MAGAZINE

“Janet Laurence, one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, has long fossicked in the muddy space between ethics, aesthetics and environmental science, seeding the dry matter of others’ data in the fertile soil of her concept to frame a case for the interconnection of all things.” — Annemarie Kiely

This month’s edition of Vogue Living features interviews with creative practitioners pushing collaboration to the edges of brilliance. JANET LAURENCE’s Earth Canvas project is highlighted, in which she has partnered with soil scientists, regeneration farmers, horticulturalists and the esteemed ecologist Professor David Watson.

The Earth Canvas project will result in an exhibition starting at the Albury Library Museum later this year followed by a tour of regional galleries including the National Museum of Australia.

CURATOR INSIGHTS: 'JACKY REDGATE - HOLD ON'

Join Geelong Gallery Director and CEO, Jason Smith, as he shares Curator insights on a tour of Jacky Redgate—HOLD ON. This exhibition will continue when government and health authorities deem it safe to re-open the Gallery.

Jacky Redgate has a 40-year practice and is critically acclaimed as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Redgate’s career began in the context of late 1970s feminism, minimalism and conceptual art. Redgate is well known for her sculptural and photographic works using systems and logic, and particularly for her sustained series of ‘mirror’ works over the past two decades that have engaged with optical phenomena, ‘perceptual dislocations’ and slippages between representation and abstraction.