Evidence of a catastrophe: The weather reports of James Guppy
The cloud/explosion paintings of James Guppy's The Weather Report series of 2006 were made as a response to 9/11.
More from this Issue
Roads cross: contemporary directions in Australian art
Curators: Vivonne Thwaites, Fiona Salmon, Anita Angel Flinders University City Gallery 29 June – 26 August 2012
Contact lenses: Lloyd Godman's ecological art
New Zealand-born ecological artist, Lloyd Godman, who now lives in Australia, has in his own determined way for over thirty years, pondered and acted upon questions of how aesthetics might be involved in creating sustainable solutions to environmental problems. Historian Helen McDonald uses eco-critic Timothy Morton's notion of ambient aesthetics to examine three of Godman's multimedia projects.
Falling through time
In September 2011 at the UTS Gallery in an exhibition called The Fall before the Fall Elvis Richardson and Daniel Mudie Cunningham showed work reflecting on 9/11. Anna Gibbs analyses how their works make this trauma "articulable, shareable and ... to some extent, bearable."
Coming soon: Big mining and the question of scale
Ann Finegan raises the alarm on the fiendish short-sighted depradations of Big Coal open cut mining in the lower Hunter Valley and other places currently under threat. She describes the work done by artist/activists in response and asks: "How does one fight such incommensurables of scale and the slow unfold of food bowl and water disaster? Where do we start? With protective changes to State and Federal legislation? With commensurable economic data?"
Shen Shaomin: The day after tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow is Chinese-Australian Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years. His visions of a warped natural world tap into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. “The space for our lives is shrinking,” Shen said in a recent interview. “The world is more and more dangerous because of the way that we live our lives.”
Somewhere: Manuwangku life with a nuclear waste dump
The current touring exhibition by Jagath Dheerasekara, Manuwangku: Under the Nuclear Cloud (2012) is a salutary reminder that the struggle for self-determination by Aboriginal people continues unabated. Jagath’s project dates back to July 2010 when Beyond Nuclear Initiative (BNI) organised a forum in Sydney to inform people of the impact of a decision made in mid 2005 by the Howard government to dump nuclear waste at Manuwangku, or Muckaty as it is popularly known, 120 km north of Tennant Creek.
Making a virtue out of adversity: Christchurch post-earthquake
Director of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu Jenny Harper writes about the resilience and the pioneering spirit of the many and varied achievements of the Gallery since the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury.
Editorial: Art in the face of disaster
Humanity seems to be on the brink of annihilating the natural world on which we depend. Our quarrelsome species has built a gigantic web of capitalism, connecting global corporations, consumerism, the markets, the military, rhetoric machines called politicians and the organisations and institutions that now include, tragically, the universities.
Beata Batorowicz – Tales within Historical Spaces
QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 September – 28 October 2012