This article is about hip young artists working outside the field of contemporary art. Even if the changes of the last forty years have meant that liking things for being cool and fashionable has generally lost its polemical significance, my sense is that this still may hold some currency with regard to the specific condition of contemporary art in South Australia. Strickland examines the work of South Australian artist Magosia Miow.
The Parks Arts & Functions Complex is situated in the Parks Community Centre in the Western suburbs of Adelaide, a region made up of many disadvantaged and minority groups. Weekly and fortnightly groups meet to explore different mediums and creative processes, and working without the assistance of a tutor means they rely on each other to develope their skills. The social benefits of these groups are often as important as the creative concerns. The centre invites guest artists to run various workshops to help sustain this interaction amongst members of the community.
UK artists Jake and Dino Chapman have been the subject of public and media controversy since their emergence on the British art scene in the early 1990s. The Chapmans assert that their shock tactics are in aid of an examination of cultural taboos.
Franchesca Cubillo, the Artistic and Cultural Director of the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, has a broad cultural background with Spanish Catholic and Filipino cultural infuences fusing seamlessly with her Aboriginal heritage. Aside from her administrative and managing roles at the institute she is also a painter and photographer. Maughan looks at Cubillos life and work as it is shaped through an appreciation of the importance of family and community.
This article explores the artistic and economic viability of living and working in South Australia, a state with less than 400,000 people, most of whom reside in the south-eastern corner. Theres enough professional isolation here to remind us that were living in a world where art is not a self-evident virtue. As a result of living in the geographic margins, artists require considerable ingenuity, flexibility and lateral thinking in order to sustain a viable practice.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is now just a little over a year old. Housed in a purpose-built venue at Federation Square in Melbourne , ACMI is home to two multi-format cinemas, a variety of exhibition, education and production zones and the Screen Gallery, the largest of its kind in the world and, arguably, the jewel in ACMIs crown. Gye looks at the recent success of the new Screen Gallery and the future direction of ACMI.