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
Former editor of Japanese Art Scene Monitor and the current Arts, Entertainment and Features Division Chief at The Japan Times, Edan Corkill looks at the wide variety of sensitive works produced by Japanese artists in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukashima Daiichi nuclear Power Plant disaster.
Published December 2012
Curator: Katie Lenanton Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 11 August – 6 October 2012
!Metro Arts, Brisbane 19 September – 6 October 2012
Jennifer Hamilton reviews English and European responses to big storms over time and suggests that even today we need "the more metaphysical dimensions of our existence – the cultural, social and political – to even begin to understand how thunder, lightning, strong winds and an abundance of water falling from the sky can still completely destroy a city and change the course of history."
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.”
From September 11, 2011 to January 8, 2012 an exhibition called September 11 curated by Peter Eleey was held at MoMA PS1 in New York. Charity Bramwell describes key works in this "shocking and intriguing" exhibition which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the historic attacks on the World Trade Centre Twin Towers.
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.
QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 September – 28 October 2012
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."
Curator: Matt Warren Laura Altman, Monica Brooks, Nicolas Bullen, Darren Cook, Gail Priest, Lawrence English, Samaan Fieck, Joel Stern Contemporary Art Spaces, Hobart 28 July – 26 August 2012
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?"
It's tough being a refugee, really tough for some. Cambodian Tuy 'KK' Sobil's story begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, travels to the US where he winds up in prison for eight years and more happily shifts to Phnom Penh where he landed as a deportee from the US and has since become an important role model teaching hiphop dancing and music to vulnerable children.
