Review of the 'About Face' exhibition: Angela Stewart and Jenny Loverock. The last 15 years has seen portraiture rise to particular importance in relation to the politics of representation, particularly self representation by women.
Rei Zunde is a photographer and painter working in Melbourne. His recent photographic work records specific cultural or sub-cultural worlds - rodeos, tattooed men and women, suburban football teams and their supporter and circus workers and their animals.
Australia now has an embryonic National Portrait Gallery in five small rooms, one larger room and three corridors in Old Parliament House, Canberra. Photos of the opening and the inaugural exhibition 'About Face'.
Exhibition review performance art Relatives/Friends/Victims
Safe Chamber
One was Vicious
Queenbitchery First Site Program,
Come Out Festival
Lion Arts Theatre
29 -31 March 1995
Historically, depictions of Aboriginal people have their gaze diverted away from the viewer. The work of Julie Dowling confronts the viewer to acknowledge the Aboriginal individual communicating as one human being to another.
It goes without saying that for a woman to make a self-portrait, a self-representation, a different world of considerations will be required than if a man entered the same quest. The weight of history, of tradition, the idea of 'truthfulness' and women's unreliability: must I go on?
Examines the fate of portrait painting in the twentieth century....the critical focus of contemporary art is undoubtedly elsewhere...Examined with reference to the portraits of artists Mike Parr, Matthys Gerber, Vicente Butron