New View: Indigenous Photographic Perspectives

The photographic and digital media work of Indigenous artists has become a powerful force in the contemporary art scene. Over the past ten years artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Gordon Bennett, Destiny Deacon, Michael Riley, Rea, Brook Andrew, Darren Siwes and Ricky Maynard have gained increasing recognition for their work.

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Nocturne

Kit Wise Inflight, North Hobart 4 - 29 July

Briony Lee Downes

Place-Urbanity: A Psycho-Ethnographic Portrait of Melbourne by Jeffrey Shaw

Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw has been at the forefront of interactive new media practice for the past two decades. He has used complex technologies to create large-scale immersive experiences that explore the meeting point between physical touch and human motion, and fantastic and uniquely conceived digital landscapes. He is also the founding Director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in Germany. Right looks at Shaw's film piece Place-Urbanity which premiered in November 2002 and which has proven to be one of the most popular works in the ACMI's collection.

Graham Right

Outside Tokyo (ideas about space and time)

John Curtin Gallery, Perth 1 May - 29 june 2003

Marie Bonnal

Impressive Risk-Taking: The Ideal City at the Valencia Biennial 2003

While the Venice Biennale remains the pre-eminent visual arts event on the international calendar there are now over 40 similar events that claim to be truly international. One of the newest is held in Spain and its second addition in 2003 gave us a tightly curated, human-scale celebration of ideas with some outstanding exhibitions. Developed expediently over the last five years, taking the community with them, the government is changing face and mindset of what was only ten years ago a city in the grip of chronic decay. Paul Greenaway reports.

Paul Greenaway

Warped Reflections

Through this article Clement examines the idea that, as human beings we never tire of looking at ourselves, and we particularly seem to like looking at a self we recognise. In this sense it is not hard to see why Mueck's sculptures are so popular, not only in their satisfying familiarity but also in the sheer technical virtuosity they display. The same cultural anxiety that subtly animates Mueck's seemingly ordinary human figures deforms the flesh of Patricia Piccinini's hyper-real creatures. Subsequent to this idea of self observation, Clement looks at the increasing fluidity of the boundaries of the human body and, through examples of such artistic concerns, questions what it means to be human.

Tracey Clement

B-Sides

Peers Project: Lucy Griggs, Chris Handran, Gia Mitchell, Sebastian Moody and Martin Smith Studio 11, at Metro Arts, Brisbane

Grant Stevens

Artrave

Artlink

Stone Into Flesh: Julie Rrap

Australian artist Julie Rrap has consistently explored issues of corporeality and history. Her recent Fleshstones series expands upon these interests by directing her attention to public sculpture and, in particular, the relationship between landscape and the body. Using digital photography Rrap questions the hierarchical organisation of space through fusing figure and ground relations together. These images refer largely to the sculptural work of Henry moore and the myth of Galatea, the tradition of figurative sculpture in which stone is transformed into flesh.

Adrian Parr

The Meaning of Aboriginal Art

This essay is not about interpreting Aboriginal art rather it is about the wider issues raised by Aboriginal art, issues that tear through the discrete context of contemporary art and connect it to history, to the everyday, to politics and to the future.

Stephanie Radok

Sideways Glances: South Africa, Australia and Intersections

With the showing of the BHP-Billiton collection of South African art at the RMIT Gallery in late 2002 early 2003, Australians not only saw convincing artworks, but also contemplated a culture that is both akin and alien. Synchronicities and differences in these two cultures and specific artistic experiences played out through the Intersections exhibition, with a recognition of the two nations being joined by mediating a white culture, looking upwards to Europe for inspiration and validation. Peers explores these and other parallels drawn between Australian and South African art and culture and addresses some of our own countries ongoing inequalities and historical misfortunes.

Juliette Peers

Why Correggio Jones is not The Hero of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney

The title of the 2004 Sydney Biennale was Biennale Of Reason and Emotion, the curator was Isabel Carlos, a Portuguese woman who will stress her cultural links with the New World, but in her case it is South America rather than North. One of the ideas she wished to explore through the Biennale was the concept of 'south' in a world dominated by the culture of the 'north'. As she states - "what I really want is to create a Biennale that works on the borders of the perception and on artworks that change our way of seeing the world around us."

Joanna Mendelssohn

4x4

Vernon Ah Kee, Jewel MacKenzie, Kim Demuth, Annie Hogan Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 12 June - 12 July 2003

Chris Handran

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