Published December 2014
Mazie Turner 1954–2014
Published 01 September 2014
Gordon Bennett 1955–2014
Published September 2014
Published 01 June 2014
Howard Taylor 1918 – 2001 WA
Published September 2001
Published 01 September 2013
Thancoupie (aka Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James AO) was a trailblazer in Aboriginal art, studying, showing and making work in ceramics for many years. Her work was shown nationally and internationally. After many years she returned home to Weipa, and while still making and exhibiting, focused much of her attention on her family, community, land rights and the next generations.
Published June 2013
Joan Kerr, Art Historian, February 1938 - February 2004
The two hours of Jake Chapmans lecture at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne in March 2004 were in many ways a homage to Modernism and the aesthetic of industry - albeit back-handed. The hierarchies of art history, the possibility of the poetic and the tradition of humanism all came under attack. The core issue circled around throughout the discussion was the degree to which art was simply a diversion for the middle-class: a market-responsive product or cathartic moment in which people could be and even pay for the privilege of being shocked.
Published June 2004
James Guppy has a curiously ambiguous place in contemporary art. This is not because of his subject matter, but rather because of his technique. For the most part Guppys recent work is not about fun, nor is it even really about sex. Rather he argues it is about the nature of exploitation. He argues that artists by their nature are voyeurs who see the world around them and all its objects as items to be used as visual product. His recent Peeping Box series taps into this idea where images of sexual activity with a particular sadistic overlay are presented behind thick glass to incite some vain attempt on the part of the viewer to engage in such voyeuristic acts.
7 February - 21 March 2004 The Gold Coast City Regional Art Gallery 14 February - 9 May 2004
While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern or contemporary lifestyle (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending. No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Foster and Jen Bereans installation at BUS Gallery, documented six miss-assembled items of IKEA furniture and dissect the curious aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms. Taylor looks at this work and others which are focused on drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration.
This essay looks at the work of Jose Da Silva, a young Brisbane artist whose work explores the way pornographic images and acts of violence shape gay male subjectivity. Da Silva underscores the way sexual violence is repeatedly fetishised and performed in gay porn, and by extension queer culture. Da Silvas work is bait, designed to lure an audience with its amateur porn pull. Once captive, an audience finds itself figuratively trapped in a seedy backroom where sexual violence is not simply patterned on recognisable social problems like homo hate crimes and/or gay male domestic violence.
Ben Booth, Neil Haddon, Anthony johnson, Anna Phillips, Lucia Usmiani and Kit Wise The Queen's Warehouse Gallery Tasmanaian museum and Art Gallery, Hobart 18 March - 2 May 2004
Mayne Centre, University of Queensland Opened 15 April 2004
Perth Symposium, various venues 19 - 21 March 2004
Peter Hennessey & Patricia Piccinimi Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide 28 February - 28 March 2004
A series of three exhibitions which appeared to erase or at least redraw the boundaries between art photography and pornography was seen at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 2003. Helen Grace talked to Alasdair Foster, Director of the ACP and curator of one of the exhibitions, about this timely and challenging project.
Nam June Palik Sydney Opera House Forecourt 8 -26 January 2004 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 26 February - April 2004
