Terra Incognita

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
Melbourne
26 May  24 June 2006

Published September 2006

Feast to Feast: QPACifika
Queensland College of Art
18 December 2005

Published September 2006

Sara Hughes: The Big Stick Up

The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references.
Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.

Published September 2006

Artrave

Published September 2006

ex de Medici: Symbols of Mortality

ex de Medicis self-named approach to her practice  Dogs Breakfastism  signals an idiosyncratic working method that has seen her embrace photocopy, sound, performance, photography and drawing across a three-decade career. Kelly Gellatly looks at the multifaceted creative occupations of de Medici as both a visual and tattoo artist and the inherent connection she makes in and between these two practices. This text looks at two of de Medicis most prominent series - Gals n Guns and Spectre - through which she explores pressing issues such as global capitalism, corporatisation, materialism and the ongoing war on nature.

Published September 2006

Art Fairs: Where to go?

Every dog has its day is an expression never more true than when it is applied to Art Fairs. In the late 1980s the Chicago Art Fair and the Cologne Art Fair were both hot spots, while in the early 1990s ARCO in Madrid started to make its presence felt. FIAC in Paris had a minor moment in the sun, as did Frankfurt and then later Berlin. By the end of the 1990s Armory in New York, Miami/Basel, and Frieze in London had all emerged as the places to go.

Published September 2006

Renate Nisi: Sculpture of the Senses

Renate Nisi is obsessed by being packaged in a body, that condition common to humans, other animals, plants and even microbes. Growing up in Germany, where 'art had epic qualities', she flirted with the Sublime and the Romantic but converted to Expressionism 'with the figure as central motif.' A further shift has occurred since then, towards minimalism and three-dimensionality, 'away from the sovereignty of forms onto the relational qualities of environments.'

Published September 2006

Office 6000

Level 2/16 Milligan Street, Perth,
27 - 31 March 2006

Published September 2006

Reflections in a Golden Eye

James Lynch. Sean Meilak. Viv Miller. Jonathan Nichols. Lisa Radford. Michelle Ussher
Curated by Jan Duffy and Kate Barber
Linden - St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts
8 July - 13 August 2006

Published September 2006

et al: the second of the ordinary practices

The second of the ordinary practices
et al
Institute of Modern Art
Brisbane
10 June - 22 July

Published September 2006

Bronia Iwanczak: The Artist as Mental Ecologist

Bronia Iwanczak is a mental ecologist, a monitor of the pervasive cultural toxicity that characterises contemporary life in the west. Her work consistently addresses the role that technological mediation plays in this cultural landscape and focuses the viewers attention on the relationship between their inner subjective worlds and outer objective worlds. Iwanczak employs touch as a vital element in her work as she believes it has some transformative effect on the viewer. This artistic preocupation is here explored with direct reference to the Timebinder series (2004), a body of work acting as a precursor to Iwanczaks most recent series Many Fish Sacrifices (2005). The subject of these works is the ugly social reality of untimely, unjust death and they ultimately act as a means through which Iwanczak aims to mobilise the current cultural inability to meaningfully honour grief.

Published September 2006

Confluence: Palimpsest

Murray Bridge Regional Gallery
24 July  31 August 2006

Published September 2006