The Obsessive Compulsive Worker

What does obsessive artwork mean? Is this a new compulsion among artists and what does it mean? The work of Hossein Valamanesh, Fiona Hall, Zhuang Hui, Zhang Huan, Shen Shaomin, Katsuhige Nakahashi are referenced.

Published December 2007

Anne Mestitz

Electric Love
Anne Mestitz
Bett Gallery, Hobart
4 August  18 August 2007

Published December 2007

Fremantle Print Awards

Fremantle Print Award 07
Fremantle Arts Centre
8 September - 21 October 2007

Published December 2007

The Hard Work

Michael Keighery, current Chair of Viscopy and past chair of NAVA and the Crafts Council of Australia reviews the apathy and ignorance of artist about their industrial, copyright and taxation rights. He draws attention to the hard worn, by NAVA and Artslaw, ruling by the Tax Office in 2005 that all kinds of artists can now claim their art business expenses against all forms of income.

Published December 2007

Indigenous Triennial

Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial 07
Curator: Brenda L. Croft.
National Gallery of Australia, 13 October 2007  10 February 2008; touring to Art Gallery of South Australia, 20 June  31 August 2008; Art Gallery of Western Australia, 20 September  23 November 2008; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, MarchMay 2009. (Note: The touring exhibition will be about 90 works rather than the 130 seen in Canberra.)

Published December 2007

Reskin: Intensive Collaboration

A fascinating participant report on an exciting collaborative project of great vision and experimentation. Reskin 2007 was developed by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), the Australian National University School of Art, the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA) and Craft Australia. It brought twenty international and national artists, designers and technologists together under the guidance of seven professional wearable technology specialists at the forefront of their respective fields. The idea of Reskin, co-ordinated by Alexander Gillespie was to design wearable technologies for the body using the latest materials and methods.

Published December 2007

Territorial

Territorial
Canberra Contemporary Art Centre
June 2007
24 hr Art, Darwin
September  October 2007
ACT Artists: Silvia Vélez, Bernie Slater, Raquel Ormella
NT artists: Franck Gohier, Catriona Stanton, Gary Lee

Published December 2007

The Hours

The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America
Curator: Sebastian Lopez
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
21 June - 2 September 2007

Published December 2007

Australian Pastoral by Jeanette Hoorn

Published December 2007

Busy Work: Dreaming Time

Justine Khamara uses a scalpel to cut out tens of thousands of images from magazines. She then joins the often identical images to make very large assemblages. The artist sees the obsessive busywork that she does with her hands as providing her with space to dream and do the real work of sifting through the stuff in her head.

Published December 2007

Everybody's Working for the Weekend

This article was written by a mysterious Australian creative labour collective possibly based in Western Australia. It humorously analyses the special characteristics of creative work as against the goals of capitalism while simultaneously possessing an intense work ethic through looking at recent artworks by Matthew Hunt, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Rodney Glick and Lynnette Voevodin, and pvi collective. It concludes that the creative task of showing how the nature of work is historically and geographically located is vital.

Published December 2007

Witnessing: Transcending the Public-Private Divide in Photography

Reveries: Mortality and photography was curated for the National Portrait Gallery by Helen Ennis and shown from 27 April to 5 August 2007. This touring show will be at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery from 19 March to 18 May 2008. It includes a wide range of approaches from the harrowing to the humorous. It includes work by Axel Poignant  a self-portrait with his last roll of film, Anne Ferran, Carol Jerrems, Craig Potton, William Yang, Anne Noble, Ruth Maddison, Bernie ORegan and Jonathon Delacour who stopped taking photographs after this series of babies and their carers in intensive care.

Published December 2007