World tree: sounds of a bigger picture. Alison Clouston and Boyd

Alison Clouston and Boyd use sound and sculpture in layered and immersive installations that draw attention to delicate and complex systems in nature and what humans have made of them. 2007 is the first year they have made an artwork with a formal carbon audit and offset. Their recent art-making has caused them to become vegetarian. They believe that Today we humans need to relinquish this deeply embedded sense that we will be saved by some force beyond us, we alone have to sort out the mess we have made of this planet Earth, our only home.

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The Road to Here

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

Hawthorne Lucy

Power and art in East Timor

Recent art made by East Timorese artists is contrasted with work by Australian war artists Wendy Sharpe and Rick Amor. Artworks made by artists from the Arte Moris Free Art School in Dili are full of passion and deep knowledge of the incongruities of war and the poverty of their lives while the artworks made by Sharpe and Amor seem remote and generalised.

Jennifer Phipps

A rusty sign at the end of a bloody empire

At Magnet Gallery in Quezon City Filipino artist Norberto Roldans exhibition Oil goes beyond the local situation and deals with the theme of peak oil as the root of all geopolitical evil, with the United States of America as the primary agent of ill intent. Lourd de Vera vividly describes it as a deliberate exercise in propaganda and sloganeering. Roldan takes a broad historical view and reflects on US policy in the Philippines over time while the rusting Caltex sign embedded in the exhibition asserts a warning: no empire lasts forever.

Lourd de Vera

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

Robert MacPherson, Vernon Ah Kee and Jeremy Hynes

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

Timothy Morrell

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

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

The revolution will not be televised: the changing landscape of film and video production in the Arab world

The situation of Arab cinema today, while it varies from Morocco to Abu Dhabi, is at an interesting turning point due to digital technology and political and economic events. In spite of censorship there are increasingly more film festivals and a burgeoning audience of cinephiles. The 2007 Cinema East Film Festival in New York celebrated independent film production: At a moment when mainstream news seems helplessly captive to global conflicts, the war on terror and the clash of fundamentalisms, independent cinema has come to be regarded as a substitute for representing people, places and their stories. Filmmakers from the region are the most enchanting human rights activists, the most playful analysts, the most imaginative historians but first and foremost, the most generous and emboldening artists.

Rasha Salti

Chance encounters: Pamela Kouwenhoven and Peter McKay

Two South Australian writers work with discarded materials to make strong commentaries on contemporary life. Pamela Kouwenhoven uses old empty plastic car battery cases to make Rosalie Gascoigne-like collages of faded colour and worn histories. Like her signature works using malthoid taken from beneath rainwater tanks, they have a strong environmental agenda, drawing attention to beauty as well as responsibility. Peter McKay makes playful works with serious messages. At night he makes patterns in oil stains on the road with glitter and photographs them. These works collapse the infinite into the accidental as galaxies appear on the ground.

Melinda Rankin

Our Lucky Country - (Still Different)

Nuha Saad, Soda_Jerk, Ron Adams, Mimi Tong, Nana Ohnesorge, Liam Benson, George Tillianakis, Huseyin Sami, Adam Norton, Ruark Lewis, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Day, Michelle Hanlin, Sarah Goffman, Anna Peters Hazelhurst Regional Gallery 8 December 2007 - 3 February 2008

Jo Higgins

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.

Timothy Morrell

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

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