The dramatic tensions of some place: Mary Scott

Tasmania-based Mary Scott's art ranges across media from traditional to cutting edge. Sometimes she meticulously paints oil on linen from digitally devised imagery, at other times she uses multiple inkjet prints as the final work. Focusing on Scott's 2007 exhibition Some Place at Criterion Gallery in Hobart, Mary Knights describes her hallucinogenic and unheimlich works as depicting 'with detachment and clarity the spectrum of human fragility.'

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Landscape and complexity: Raquel Ormella

Raquel Ormella's art is political and takes many circuitous approaches to complex issues. Her recent work Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney shown in the 2008 Sydney Biennale called up a political landscape of maddening complexity even as it emphasises the need for direct action. Bec Dean writes: 'Ormella is a kind of critical idealist who understands not only the effectiveness of lobbying and the power of the individual in bringing about change but also the slow-burn persistence of such change.'

Bec Dean

Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award 2008

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Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba seduction and imponderability

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's best-known work is the video Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex - For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (2001)in which fishermen ride cyclos (cycle rickshaws) underwater across the seabed. An engaging retrospective of Nguyen-Hatsushiba's thought-provoking and challenging work was shown in 2007 at the Museum of Art Lucerne and in 2008 at the Manchester Art Gallery displayed the work. In his most recent and ongoing work he is running a global marathon, the diameter of the earth. The artist says: 'After developing various kinds of memorial projects, I needed to experience the nature of physical struggle myself.'

Catherine Wilson

Rose Farrell and George Parkin: home (operating) theatre

Rose Farrell and George Parkin's art consist of photographs of tableaux involving the artists in sets that they build in their home. They frequently copy old medical illustrations in which the reality of the past is both made to live and to seem ever more mythical. Dylan Rainforth takes an informative and affectionate approach to the complexity of Farrell and Parkin's modus operandi and their newest photographic series called Restoration.

Dylan Rainforth

III Performances (in white cube)

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God-favoured, Rodney Glick: Surveyed

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Bal Tashchit: Thou Shalt Not Destroy

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Lynette Wallworth: shared moments of revelation

Lynette Wallworth's New Media Art is subtle and complex. Empathy is the emotion at the heart of all her works such as Invisible by Night in which the viewer activates the work by reaching out to make contact with a grieving woman and Hold in which viewers catch imagery in glass bowls. Wallworths international profile is rising. She has exhibitions planned for France (Aix en Provence Festival), the Melbourne Festival in 2008 and the Adelaide Film Festival 2009 and with each new project she is striking an emotional chord in her audiences that resonates long after the physical engagement with the work is over.

Ted Snell

George Gittoes art and the war on terror

George Gittoes' latest film Miscreants was made in Pakistan and records the contradictions of life there with the polemic of Goya and the speed of an MTV music clip. This film follows his earlier cult films Soundtrack to War and Rampage. Gittoes is never a dispassionate observer, he continues to paint and to draw, making war art that is emotional as well as rich with the difficult truths of our time.

Joanna Mendelssohn

Hijacked

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Translating from the dead to the living, Karin Lettau

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Perils of the studio: inside the artistic affairs of bohemian Melbourne, Alex Taylor

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Juliette Peers

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