It's Not You, It's Me - I Just Don't, You Know, Think We're Compatible

"It should go without saying that our responses to the handmade, the mass-produced and techno gadgetry are principally structured within and by fantasy worlds. Cook explores peoples relationships to objects in a world that is perpetually developing and enhancing itself materially, or so it seems.

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Hand to Mouse: Design and the Handmade

There have always been cycles in the making of what we describe as art, crafts and design, where surges of new ideas have been followed by revivals of earlier values or reform movements that challenge both. The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, is working on an exhibition for late 2006, on the interface between art, design, industry and the values of the handmade. Cochranes hope is that it will challenge audiences to look closely at some of the exciting working relationships that are possible.

Grace Cochrane

Bush TV's: Piliyi - Good One

Nyinkka Nyunyu is an art and culture centre located on Warumungu land in Tennant Creek, right in the middle of the Northern Territory. From the time the idea came up to build something alongside the sacred site of Nyinkka Nyunya, art was always going to be an integral part of the project. The result of many brainstorming sessions amongst traditional owners of the land on which Tennant Creek stands was the idea of dioramas, or Bush TVs to provide the means to present history and contemporary life through art to a diverse audience.

Alison Alder

Pixel Perfect: The Craft of Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

Walkling proclaims that something is being mourned that has to do with the physical object and its associated labour, in the meantime the distinction between amateur and professional photographer is lessening as this particular creative niche is becoming more automated.

Les Walkling

The Hand in Making

The Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial began in 1975 and every two years a collection of contemporary fibre textile work tours nationally to metropolitan and regional audiences. For Attiwill, guest curator of the 16th Biennial, the spark for the exhibition A Matter of Time came from Sue Rowleys wisdom: it is useful to think of craft in terms of multiple temporalities, A Matter of Time is an exploration of this usefulness.

Suzi Attiwill

The Sounds of Silence

Through traditional method, an explicit residue of manual labour, and a constructed subject, Ricky Swallows wooden work suggests a past tense, which leads the viewer backwards through the material history of the work. The Defining aspects of Swallows approach are distinctly framed in the western tradition of the artisan and the language of figuration.

Damiano Bertoli

Australian Drawing Now: Labouring Lightly

The on again/off again love affair between drawing and contemporary art practice seems to have been going on ad nauseam. From the sixties through to the present day, ongoing tensions between the apparent values of traditional and conceptual art have resulted in much of today's appreciation for the reworking of both aesthetics in what has become a new labour of love.

Kit Wise

In the Wake of Gesture: Architecture and the Handmade

Architecture has long since surrendered the tactile in favour of grander visions. Through an examination of Sandra Seligs recent work Synthetic Infinite at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the unique responses to architecture and the handmade that this work displays, Murray attempts to question how we might then consider architecture and our relationship with built matter to restore a direct connection with human experience.

Ainslie Murray

Living Together is Easy

National Gallery of Victoria: Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne 27 August - 7 November 2004 Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Japan 24 January - 28 March 2004 Curated by Jason Smith and Eriko Osaka

Jeff Khan

Patrick Hall's Cabinets of Everyday Curiosities

For Hughes, Patrick Halls cabinets recall the great elaborately decorated cabinets of the 17th century. Rather than mere decoration, Halls cabinets express a poetry of the everyday that is neither a condescending celebration nor a critical analysis but a deeply personal response to his materiel.

Peter Hughes

Artifically Reconstructed Habitats: Finola Jones

Canberra Contemporary Art Space 13 August - 25 September 2004 Gertrude Contemporary Spaces, Melbourne 29 October - 20 November 2004

Anna Zagala

Fine Art Graduate and Honours Exhibitions Beyond

Griffith University, Queensland College of Art 24 - 27 November 2004 GraduArt 2004 Toowoomba Regional Gallery 27 November 2004 - 30 January 2005 modus vivendi Queensland University of Technology 3 - 5 November 2004

Vanessa McRae

Petrified Nature: Julia Robinson and Morgan Allender, Birds and Bees, Louise Flaherty

Downtown Art Space, Adelaide 28 October - 6 November 2004 The Project Space, CACSA, Adelaide 29 October - 5 December 2004

Sera Waters

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