Whyalla Art Prize
Growing up the visual culture
More from this Issue
The Sea Is In Them: Narelle Autio and Trent Parke
Narelle Autio and her partner in life and work, Trent Parke, completed a 16-month journey around Australias coastline in 2004. The two set out to document the culture of Australian coastal dwellers with an exhibition lined up at the Australian Centre for Photography the following year. Baxter speaks of her first encounter with the works of these remarkable photographers and goes on to offer some insight into the profundity encapsulated by these images.
Octopus 5
Raafat Ishak, Horst Kiechle, Kaji Ryui, Grant Stevens. Curator: Nicholas Chambers Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces 9 July - 21 August 2004
Peter Timms' 'What's wrong with contemporary art'
Blak Insights Queensland Art Gallery 3 July - 30 October 2004
Jacky Redgate: Survey 1980-2003 [Three Exhibitions]
III, V, VI of Contemporary Art Projects SA 2004 Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Curator, Alan Cruickshank 23 April - 23 August 2004
That was Then, This is Now: New Work by David Wadelton
David Wadeltons artistic career took a dramatic turn in the years 1997-98 after he purchase an iMac computer. Prior to this time he had been painting hybrid canvases and creating refined pencil and silverpoint drawings that displayed a unique quirckiness that was informed by the artists affection for the culture and language of Pop art. Gott explores the apparent shift in Wadeltons work, from the assemblages of the everyday objects that he first exhibited to his new works; mesmerising, hypnotic, dizzying.
Michael Jagamara Nelson Gives It A Go
Michael Jagamara Nelson is an artist who love - maybe even needs - a challenge. As Johnson examines, he has had his fair share. With his first painting, a piece he did for his uncle Jack Wayuta (a senior custodian for the Flying Ant Dreaming for Yuwinji) going unrecognised as one of his own for fifteen years, Michael Nelson made his mark in the indigenous art scene after his big break from Daphne Williams of Papunya Tula Arts.
The Poetics of Agoraphobia
Polish/Australian artist Gosia Wlodarczak draws obsessively, as a means of engaging with a biological cognitive bedrock. By drawing out the duration of her being she avoids the burden of memories and hope. This, she thinks, will lighten the weight of ideology that oppresses her with its exaggerated claims of authenticity...Ideology is already manifest in her sence of self, freedom and individual consciousness. It is even there in the languages she lives between; in her name, in her history, a graduate of the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, now living in inner-city Perth.
That Strange Quivering of Substance: The Recent Paintings of Catherine Woo
Many years ago the Chinese writer Lin Yutang expressed that, from an Oriental perspective, Western artists always seem to depict objects from the outside, whereas those from China and Japan express their experience of them from within. This Eastern approach is inherent in the culture, not a position able to be merely adopted, and springs in part from religious inheritance, but also from the pictorial nature of Asian written languages. This inherent approach can be found in the recent work of Catherine Woo, expressing some sort of biological affinity. If the paintings can be said to be about anything, it is a the fine balance between energy and rest rather than the apparent subject matter.
Philip Wolfhagen
The Inner Edge Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania, Inveresk 14 June - 9 July 2004