The error of our ways: Madeleine Kelly

Brisbane-based artist Madeleine Kelly's oil paintings approach big issues through precise depictions of incongruous narratives which draw on both personal and mythological sources. Her comments on global issues like oil and pollution, human folly and its consequences, are framed like dream scenarios that touch us all. Kelly came to Australia from Germany when she was two and the celebrated 19th century German childrens story Struwwelpeter written and vividly illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann echoes in her imaginative paintings of cautionary tales and surreal spaces.

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Hyperlexic, desalinated but not scary

Separate performance works by The Collective (Alana Hunt, Sylvia Schwenk, Ingrid Dernee, Megan Brewster, Susie Fraser, Anna Williams), Tony Schwensen and Zina Kaye confront the complexity of the interlinked flashpoints of oil, energy, human rights, global warming, rampant flows of predatory capital and the war on terror with notions of resistance and how individuals can act. Schwensen was at Artspace, The Collective in Trajectories of Dissent at Little Fish Gallery and Mori Gallery while Zina Kaye in a Terminus Project at Westfield Bondi Junction broadcast her own comments on the massive LED signs hanging in the atrium of the mall.

Ann Finegan

Robert MacPherson, Vernon Ah Kee and Jeremy Hynes

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 8 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

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Wonderful World

Curator: Erica Green 12 October 7 December 2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

John Neylon

Artrave

Artlink

The winding way

Cairns-based artist Tijn Meulendijks considers the plant world as his medium. His exhibition, Natura est ars, held at Umbrella Studio in Townsville in 2007, was concentrated around a single plant community gathered while walking in a coastal Melaleuca swamp after fire had affected the environment.

Jacqui Stock

The Road to Here

David Martin 17 November 2007 - 6 January 2008 Devonport Regional Gallery

Hawthorne Lucy

Handling the Adelaide Biennial

Stephanie Britton interviewed Felicity Fenner, curator of the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, to find out what Handle with Care really means in the twenty-first century.

Stephanie Britton

Obscure dimensions of conflict

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green travelled in early 2007 for five weeks to the Middle East, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf as the Australian War Memorials official war artists. The artists will make a series of oil paintings for the War Memorial from some of the many photos they took as well as developing a series of photos outside the official commission. The photos show an abstracted ruined world, shadows, machinery, stockpiles of weapons behind barbed wire, aircraft, campsites and deserts. The Ziggurat of Ur is evident in two photographs of Iraq and eloquently symbolises the rise and fall of cultures and armies across the land.

Warwick Heywood

Fierce or Friendly: Humans in the Animal World

Curators: Craig Judd, Kathryn Medlock, Peter J. Hughes, Vicky Farmery Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) 14 December 20076 April 2008

Judith Abell

Conducting Mobility

Artists thinking and making work about fuel span the globe and delve into a wide range of ramifications. UK-based PLATFORM have done a multi-pronged report called Unraveling the Carbon Web on four oil-producing hot spots, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia and the Caucasus. Chicago-based Laurie Palmers Notions of Expenditure solicits renderings of exercise equipment and gyms redesigned for the production of electricity. Brian Collier wanders the edges of Illinois highways to locate thriving non-human life forms. kanarinka documented her running of the official evacuation route out of Boston while collaborators Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, Pond and Greenaction made an audio guide for a Californian highway drawing its military, residential and agricultural stories together.

Claude Willey

The whistleblower of Discovery Bay

Carmel Wallace makes artworks with flotsam and jetsam. They comment on the immense amount of human debris she finds on the shoreline as well as on the scarred ecologies of the sea and the land. She also instigated the Great Southern West Walk project (a NETS Victoria exhibition touring throughout 2008) that brought a diverse range of artists to the chain of beaches, national parks and state forests located to the west of Portland near the Victoria-South Australian border. The project was driven by her need to develop her own knowledge and affinity for the land, to explore how art might contribute to environmental solutions and to explore walking as an all-encompassing method of experiencing the environment.

Juliette Peers

[the space in between] Book project

Curated by Tara Gilbee VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 13 July -4 August 2007 Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery 15 March - 13 April 2008 Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts 8 August - 14 September 2008

Simon Gregg

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