Australian Pastoral by Jeanette Hoorn

Published December 2007

A Bush Camp in a Mysterious Land: Guan Wei

Chinese-Australian artist Guan Wei first visited Australia eighteen years ago but it was only in 2006 that he went bush for two weeks with nine other artists, on an artists camp organised by Darwin's contemporary art space 24 Hour Art in collaboration with Injalak Arts and Crafts in Western Arnhem Land. His vivid experiences of the great outdoors, its sounds, animals and birds, led to his A Mysterious Land series. He worked with local Aboriginal artists, was shown rock paintings and found similarities between Aboriginal culture and Taoist philosophy.

Published December 2007

No. 1

No. 1
six a, North Hobart
24 August - 24 September 2007

Published December 2007

Painting at SALA

Shades of the Real: a selective survey of tonal painting
Adelaide Central Gallery
20 July - 11 August 2007
artists: Morgan Allender, Nona Burden, Stephanie Crase, Kveta Deans, Louise Feneley, Mary-Jean Richardson, Chelsea Lehmann, Rachel Smyth, Deborah Trusson, Yve Thompson
Christian Lock
Greenaway Art Gallery
4 -29 July 2007
Kaylie Weir (in Noodle)
Premier Art Gallery SALA exhibition
3 August  1 September 2007
Learning to Speak
Simone Kennedy
Artlab SALA Exhibition
3-19 August 2007

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

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

Sara Elson

Sarah Elson
Anigozanthos (eudaimonia hybrid)
5 August - 2 September 2007
Galerie Desseldorf, Perth

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

Valuing Relationships: Concertina

Concertina is a group of seven artists, Katrina Weber, Ros Miller, Wendy Rushby, Kathryn Hill, Wendy Todd, Dana Kinter and Anny Gooden, who for six years have been working as a collective creating within self-prescribed boundaries. Once a year they set aside their own practices and embark upon a major collaborative project leading to an exhibition. Their latest venture meant one artist Anny Gooden stepping outside the group, she was overseas, and providing instructions to the others. The resulting exhibition, Text as Muse, was shown at Light Square Gallery from 27 June - 26 July 2007.

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

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

The CDEP (Community Development Employment Program) was axed by the Howard Federal Government throughout the Northern Territory though is still current in South Australia and Western Australia. The Program was launched in 1977 by the Fraser Government and has been a very valuable way of getting Aboriginal people to be engaged productive community memes in art centres and other activities. A number of key Aboriginal art centres rely on CDEP staff for printing, administration, preparators, artists and craftspeople. It is a vital component in building community self-reliance and pride.

Published December 2007

Artworks Out on the Beach Townsville

In September 2007 in Townsville Stephanie Radok attended the Perc Tucker Regional Gallerys Strand Ephemera, a biennial outdoor sculpture and installation exhibition first held in 2001. The Strand is a 2km landscaped beachfront park where local and interstate artists placed their site specific works which ranged from an Aeolian harp by Nameer Davis to a throne made of seasponges by Wendy Robertson. An enthusiastic audience of children and Strand-strollers made their way from work to work thinking about art and its myriad manifestations. Commissioned artists making work in shipping containers were Craig Walsh, Bonemap, Donna Marcus, Chris Fox and Richard Goodwin.

Published December 2007