Issues

Issue 30:2 | June 2010 | The Underground
The Underground
Issue 30:2 | June 2010
Issue 27:3 | September 2007 | Screen Deep
Screen Deep
Issue 27:3 | September 2007

Articles

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Editorial
What we talk about when we talk about ‘the underground’
Thirteen paragraphs on the underground

Artist/ writer, curator/designer at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation Teri Hoskin's thirteen paragraphs sum up facts, apprehensions and suspicions about the underground.

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Adapt or die
“An underground artist? Me?” Ian Milliss on maintaining the rage to avoid extinction
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Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground
Margie Borschke was in Canada in the mid 1980s when she discovered the Underground.
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1. Muffled sounds 2. The ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning
Emeritus Flinders University Professor and philosopher Donald Brook writes about his 'new theory' and why it has never been taken up. He wonders: 'Could it be that he is wrong?'
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Stop the press: the allure of ink
Caren Florance is Ampersand Duck, a blog and nom de press for activities including letterpress printing. Florance has breathed the ink and describes the history of moveable type focusing on the recent past and the present and how something magical happens to text when it is printed.
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When zines meet archives: above - and below - ground collections
Marmalade-maker and Phd candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney Jessie Lymn's writing focuses on her research into unconventional archival spaces that hold collections of zines, those idiosyncratic sites of memory.
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Conquest for country: Rockhole or mine
Anthropologist Eve Vincent has done fieldwork in mining towns in South Australia. She writes about Ali Russell's documentary Keeper about mining on Kokatha land near Ceduna.
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Dig it! The hole in Australian contemporary art
Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Glenn Barkley surveys the hole in contemporary Australian art starting at the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape.
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How to make trouble and influence people: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti and political mischef-making from across Australia
Iain McIntyre's book How To Make Trouble And Influence People describes the secret ludic history of creative troublemaking in Australia over two centuries. It began as a series of zines and is now published by Breakdown Press to impress new readers and inspire new acts of defiance.
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Underground film in Australia
Writer and curator of the moving image Danni Zuvela examines underground film in Australia to draw out its spirit it from the pre-Seventies to now - 'profane, collective, improvised, transgressive, convivial, illegitimate'.
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Seed bomb
Farmer, artist, writer Kirsten Bradley who works from Milkwood Permaculture Farm near Mudgee in the high country of NSW spills the beans on how to make a seedball or seedbomb to revegetate or vegetate urban spaces around you. Like guerilla gardening, it's quick, it's quiet and it creeps up on you.
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Street dreams
Peter Drew knows the street art of Adelaide like you know the back of your hand.
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Underground networks in the age of web 2.0
Media Theorist, nethead, activist and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures Geert Lovink reports on the erotica of touching between 'weak links' and the importance of experimenting with new forms of organisation both on and offline.
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Steampunk: gunpowder and cups of tea
Between 13 October 2009 and 21 February 2010, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford held the world's first museum exhibition of Steampunk art. Writer, artist, emerging, networked and distributed culture geek Melinda Rackham was there.
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Renew Adelaide pilot: 2 wheels good
Zine publisher and educator Dr Ianto Ware is the Project Manager of Renew Adelaide, an urban renewal clone of Marcus Westbury's Renew Newcastle, in which the 'definition of creativity has to be broad enough to encompass the wide fields of socially innovative activity that simply doesn't fit elsewhere.'
Remembering Judith Hoffberg 1934-2009

Expert on Len Lye, editor of Umbrella Magazine Judith Hoffberg died on January 16, 2009. Tributes to her life and work continue with a memorial exhibition planned for late 2010. Judith Hoffberg wrote of her last visit to Adelaide in 2002 as one of ‘’Paradise regained’...

Remembering Judith Hoffberg BA, MA, MLS, 1934-2009

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Before and After Science: 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
Curators: Charlotte Day and Sarah Tutton Art Gallery of South Australia 27 February – 2 May 2010
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Adelaide International 2010: Apart, We are Together
Raeda Saadeh, Praneet Soi Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Rosella Biscotti Australian Experimental Art Foundation Nina Fisher & Maroan el Sani, Donghee Koo, Li Mu, Tara Donovan, Imma Issa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul Anne & Gordon Samstag Art Museum Lucy and Jorge Orta JamFactory Gallery Julian Hooper Flinders University Art Museum Curator: Victoria Lynn 26 February – 14 March 2010
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Local Studies: Fiona MacDonald
Curator: Jo Holder Artspace Mackay 18 December 2009 – 31 January 2010
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Warm Up: Mike Singe
Gallery 6a, Hobart 9 April - 1 May 2010
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Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987-2007; Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee
Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987 – 2007 Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale Curator: Karra Rees 30 January - 28 February 2010 Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale 6 February - 14 March 2010
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The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography: FotoFreo 2010
The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography: FotoFreo 2010 Silence – The West Australian Wheatbelt : Brad Rimmer Fremantle Prison 20 March – 16 May 2010 The Clubs: David Dare Parker The Fremantle Club 20 March – 18 April 2010 FotoFreo 2010 Fringe Festival Paradise Lost: Rebecca Dagnall Studio Red Dust, Mount Hawthorn 20 March – 10 April 2010
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Cubism and Australian Art
Curators: Leslie Harding, Sue Cramer Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 24 November 2009 – 8 April 2010
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Sylvie Blocher: What is Missing?
Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest 13 February 2010 - 4 April 2010 Museum of Contemporary Art 17 February 2010 - 25 April 2010
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Feminism Never Happened
Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Kirsty Bruce, Jacqueline Fraser, Anastasia Klose, Fiona Lowry, Fiona Pardington, Yvonne Todd, Jemima Wyman Curator: Robert Leonard IMA (Institute of Modern Art), Brisbane 30 January - 20 March 2010
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Ruth Waller: A 30 Year Survey
Curator: Deborah Clark Canberra Museum and Gallery 6 February - 6 June 2010
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Everything's Alright: Hossein Ghaemi, Andrew Liversidge, Yasmin Smith
Curator: Amanda Rowell Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney March 4 - 27 2010
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Sue Lovegrove: The Shape of Wind
Bett Gallery, Hobart 3 March – 6 April 2010
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Dykes to Watch Out For

A selection of 4 strips produced between 1987 - 2005, courtesy the author.

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Entering the Screen
New interactive screen spaces of the web, games and virtual worlds act as portals allowing us to become a part of the media image rather than just watching it. No longer content to just watch the action, were creating our own online identities and becoming our own screen heroes acting out our own virtual adventures. This article focuses on the new virtual world of Second Life and discusses the idea of avatar (virtual pictorial) identities via the works of a selection of new media artists: Neal Stephenson, Eva and Franco Mattes, Emil Goh, Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, Adam Nash, Christopher Dodd, Kyal TripodiGazira Babeli and Pierre Proske.
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Memoirs of a Videophile: Video Cannibalism, A Personal View
In this article David Broker looks selectively at the brief history and development of video art, a trying medium voluntarily lost to him around 1985. Broker uses three examples of the video grande- Francesco Vezzolis Comizi di Non Amore, Emmanuelle Antilles Angels Camp and a work by Miguel Calderon featured in the 2004 Sao Paulo Biennale. Each work exists in its own way as a continuum upon which the trajectory of the technologies they have absorbed is not only clear but also fundamental to the work. As Broker declares the video revival has in itself been a spectacle, with digital video driving its acolytes to ever-greater heights of excess.
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Black Box/White Cube: Cinema in the Gallery
Historically, the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every imaginable problem and inequality. How to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral fireworks of yesteryears between-images? Martin proposes that the gallery needs to take its filmic pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery and film works need to be fully valued in themselves  by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries  for their history, their value, their power and (yes) their art.
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Look Into My Eyes: Behind the Screens with ACMI
This article looks at the current state of screen culture in Australia, focusing on the program architecture of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in particular. For screen culture in Australia, the market-driven economy has provided a great number of challenges in the kind of content it can exhibit and the ways in which it can be exhibited in a sustainable and meaningful way. For ACMI one of the key points is in providing the discussion platform by which screen artists or even mathematicians, writers and psychologists can participate  it is through this approach, applying the filmic principles and content concepts to broader social issues and discussions that the greatest power amongst audiences arrises.
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Databases: Recombinant Interactives
Ann Finegan looks at the world of interactive media arts, in particular database content interactivity. One example Finegan uses in her discussion is Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewskis Seeker, winner of an Award for Distinction for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica 2007. Seeker belongs to an emergent genre of database works which draw from the broader media, putting the viewer into the web of connections through which the forces of politics and economics determine the fate of peoples and of persons. Other artists discussed are Josh On, Lev Manovich, Linda Dement, Troy Innocent, Doll Yoko (aka Francesca da Rimini aka Gash Girl), Stephen Honegger, Rachel Baker, John Tonkin and Barbara Campbell. Finegan proclaims that at present the future of interactives is weighed in a choice between the seductive action of computer gaming as sites for artistic intervention, and data-mapping with its deep and active connections in realworld events.
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A Detour Off the Art-Path
Whilst in Europe this year, Julianne Pierce made a detour and visited the small city of Wolfsburg in central north Germany where she visited the privately run contemporary art museum Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. A delightful discovery was made in the retrospective exhibition of Douglas Gordon, an artist who works with the time-based foundation of cinema and transforms it into stripped back experience of time and motion. He is interested in the epic nature of cinema  the big screen, the close-up, the majestic soundtrack  but is concerned more with an extended experience of time and memory. Viewing several works together projected large in a darkened monolithic space brought Gordons fusing of cinema and visual arts into a mesmeric articulation of his vision and practice.
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The Space of Presence: Leigh Hobba
This article examines Australian video and performance artist Leigh Hobbas recent retrospective The Space of Presence at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition presented a precise slice of Hobbas electronic oeuvre including twelve works which highlight the materiality and texture of video as a medium. Together they convey a sense of awe, a pre-verbal ambiguity, recontextualising Hobbas recurrent and connected themes. This article also raises issues of space, infrastructure and technical facilities when considering the ways in which new media art is to be viewed.
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New Media at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12
Jasmin Stephens presents a personal recollection of this years Venice Biennale and documenta 12. As Stephens states, Venice reflected the worldwide trend of artists reappraising iconic moments from Conceptual Art from the early seventies and in so doing taking up the low-tech equipment associated with them. Artists here discussed are Aernout Milk, Willie Doherty, Paolo Canevari, Sophie Whettnall, Shaun Gladwell, Yang Zhenzhong, Emily PrinceSusan Norrie, Joshua Mosley and Tabaimo, Nedko Solakov, Mario Garcia, Felix Gmelin, Steve McQueen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ines Doujak, Lili Dujourie, Zofia Kulik, John McCracken, Harun Farocki and Artur Zmijewski.
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Phoenix Halle: Model for a Media Centre
The privately funded centre of the PHOENIX Halle, which grew out of a small media arts organization called HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), stands alone in a derelict steel mill in Dortmund, Germany. Established in 1996 by German curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ, HMKV is dedicated to curatorial research and practice in the media arts field. HMKV and PHOENIX Halle are fundamentally exploring how artists create meaning and interpret the rapid states of change in our contemporary post-industrial society. Julianne Pierce briefly examines the work of HMKV and the PHOENIX Halle during her travels in Germany.
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Playing Biennially: Experimenta Playground
Experimenta Playground, an international biennial exhibition of media art, marks Experimentas 21-year commitment to innovation in both production and in promoting and exhibiting new media art throughout Australia and abroad. With artworks that engage with the creative possibilities emerging from a dynamic interaction between the moving image, art and new technologies, each artist in the exhibition creatively expands the definition of play, performance and ritual. Here the revelation of technology and spatial features create new ways of appreciating the construction of fantasy. Participating artists include : June Bum Park, Guillaume Reymond, Shu Lea Cheang, Hiraki Sawa and Tomoyuki Washio, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jesse Stevens, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Philip Worthington, Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matthew Dwyer, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Eugenio Ampudia and Robert Hughes.
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BEAP 07: A Meditation
This examination of the 2007 Biennale of Electronic Art Perth (BEAP), lead Marshall to an ultimate abandonment of its underlying theme of stillness, instead choosing to look at the profusion of Australian and international art on offer. This article details key works by artists Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Bill Viola, Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, Orlan, George Khut, Hannah Matthews, Boris Ledagsen and Natascha Stellmach and Ulf Langheinrich.
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Crossing Over: Digital Media at the Adelaide Film Festival 2007
The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is an event that has always had an eye on technological innovation and evolution and it is a tenet of AFF to celebrate screen culture in all its genres and formats. This years AFF was the host of a suite of symposiums, exhibitions, thinktanks, and screenings that spotlight the popularity and possibilities of content outside the linear feature film. This article details three of these events in particular  Crossover, the Broadcast Summit and one focused on machinima. The evidence of AFFs Digital Media strategy, focusing on seminars that invite audience interaction and discussion, means that Adelaide audiences will be part of this exciting artistic and technological discussion.
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Taipei 101: Video at the National Palace Museum
Discovering the Other National Palace Museum, Taipei, July 7 to August 19, 2007

Merilyn Fairskye briefly discusses her journey to Taipei where she took part in an exhibition of video installations Discovering the Other, the first ever contemporary art exhibition to be held at the National Palace Museum. Curator Gertjan Zuilhofs discription of this exhibition can be seen as a metaphor for his world view shadows, spirits and ghosts seemed to be everywhere, while at the same time the works engaged with the world of people and place, and the precarious struggle to maintain individual and cultural identities. Featured artists included: Deborah Stratman, Ella Raidel and Lin Hongjohn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Merilyn Fairskye.
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Lynette Walworth
Lynette Wallworth is driven by a passion to explore the natural world, to capture human stories, to explore the past and evoke memory and experience. As a media artist, she strives  and succeeds  to achieve an emotional and powerful connection between her images and her viewer.
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Daniel Crooks
Daniel Crooks is a digital media artist interested in distorting what is familiar to us and offering it back as a study in how we experience time and place. His digital manipulation of everyday materials and landscapes such as trains, trams and the passages of pedestrians across public spaces transform the work into a vibrant palette of colours and textures. Crooks is an artist who creates moving images that engage the viewer beyond and beneath the surface of the screen.
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Anne and Gordon Samstag, Museum of Art
This article previews the new Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, opened on 11 October 2007, which is discussed as a significant addition to art exhibition spaces in Adelaide in terms of scale, capacity and technology. This museum, designed by multi-award winning Melbourne architect John Wardle, is a public space in which artwork, in its selection, hanging, and experience, cannot ignore the active engagement of visitors. The Samstag Museum of Art plays a part in extending the role of museums into new categories of cultural industries, and the complicated relations between leisure, knowledge and libidinal economies.
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Pippin Drysdale; Design, Craft and the Smart Syndrome
Pippin Drysdale Lines of Site By Ted Snell Fremantle Arts Centre Press 2007 174pp rrp $45 Recently published in Perth with support from Arts WA is an incisive monograph on West Australian ceramist Pippin Drysdale by Ted Snell. Snell has written a substantial book of five chapters, dividing Drysdales artistic evolution into four eras. Through in-depth engagement with particular vessels or series Snell traces her increasing mastery of the allusive and abstract power of the ceramic medium. Smart Works Design and the Handmade Edited by Grace Cochrane Powerhouse Publishing 192pp rrp $35.95 This publication is in many respects an exemplary book of an exemplary exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum and is about design that reflects the values of the handmade. With 40 individuals and groups represented across the categories of jewellery and metalwork, ceramics, glass and resin, fashion and textiles, and furniture this publication encompasses a truly diverse range of approaches from totally hand-crafted to high-tech manufacture.
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TOGart
TOGart Contemporary Art Award 2007 Parliament House, Darwin 12 July - 30 July 2007
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Thresholds of Tolerance
Thresholds of Tolerance ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra 10 May - 5 June 2007
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Freestyle: New Australian Design
Freestyle: new Australian design for living Curator: Brian Parkes QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 June - 22 July 2007
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Unsettled: 10 Posters
Unsettled: 10 Posters Inkahoots RAW Space Galleries, Brisbane June 2007
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A Constructed World
Increase Your Uncertainty A Constructed World Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2 June - 26 July 2007
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The Rules of Engagement
Rules of Engagement Curator: Mark Feary West Space 25 May - 16 June 2007
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Eternal Beautiful Now
Eternal Beautiful Now Curator: Tania Doropoulos Sherman Galleries, Sydney 10 - 26 May 2007
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New Deities
New Deities: art and the cult of celebrity Curator: Catherine Wolfhagen Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania 30 June - 29 July 2007
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Snap Freeze
Snap Freeze Curator: Jenna Blyth Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria 20 May - 11 November 2007
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Room
Room Curator: Derek Hart CAST Gallery, Hobart 26 May - 17 June 2007
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Hatched
Hatched 07 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 20 April - 24 June 2007
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Emma Northey
Lucent Drones Emma Northey Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide 16 May - 24 June 2007
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Ms & Mr
Heavy Sentimental Ms & Mr Kaliman Gallery, Sydney 1 - 30 June 2007
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Bridget Currie, James Dodd, Louise Haselton, Laura Wills
parkside nomadic group moves inland 4 winter : Laura Wills Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 1 June - 8 July 2007 Years without Magic: Louise Haselton & Bridget Currie SASA Gallery, UNISA, Adelaide 12 June - 6 July 2007 Speakeasy: James Dodd Experimental Art Foundation 13 July - 18 August 2007
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Matt Hunt
Cause I see the Light Surrounding You, so Dont Be Afraid Matthew Hunt Turner Galleries, Perth 1 - 30 June 2007
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