Currents I

On Being Fair

Stephanie Britton

On Your (Motor)bike - REVIEW: Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney, 2004, and 2004: Australian Culture Now, Melbourne

Sydney Biennale bad, 2004 in Melbourne good. The artworld's consensus locked in quick and hard. Fair? Of course not. Why compare the two, anyway? Because the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) seemed to set it up that way, by the timing of their show. They certainly took as 2004's model the nationally bound Whitney Biennial and, in particular, the Art Gallery of New South Wales's Perspecta exhibitions (last one 1999) - in turn established to counter the perceived internationalism of the Sydney Biennale.

Ian North

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.

Vivien Johnson

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.

Virginia Baxter

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.

Ian McLean

Raw and Cooked Margins

A series of journeys and pilgrimages characterise Paul Hobans life, his account of which is spotted with significant exhibitions, readings, people, music and events. It wasnt until 1993, when he was 39, that Hoban first had a one man exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery. Radok here paints a clear picture of his work - A sense of surfaces and layers; words - intelligible, unintelligible, back-to-front, upside-down; wrinkles and transparency; colour and pattern; modernism and archaism, and so on. A myriad of conceptual and stylistic devises that exist largely within the margins of art conventions.

Stephanie Radok

What's Mine Is Yours: Touching the Surface of the Practice of Sue Ford

Melbourne artist Sue Fords 2003 photographic series Continuum is a suitable portal through which Stanhope looks at aspects of Fords work, a practice that has consistently evinced strength of vision and a humanistic philosophy, rich in connecting personal and local subjects to the field of national culture, social politics and the nature of individual existence. Continuum looks at the aftermath of bushfires and is aligned with her passionate reflection and documentation of the nature of our being in both time and place. If there is one medium that records time it is photographs - Sue Ford.

Zara Stanhope

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.

Ted Gott

MFC's and Gunter Christmann

Gunter Christmann was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936. After two years in Canada, he arrived in Australia in 1959 and studied, somewhat casually, at the National Art School, Sydney, from 1962 to 1965. This article looks at the life and work of Christmann, that shambolic figure who, even as he is approaching his seventieth year, shows something of the perpetual youthful student. From his dress and demeanour to his his sloping walk and willingness to talk to the people he knows. A self taught artist, Christmann once saw his work as Geometric Abstraction and now states that the only major difference in style is the lack of intellectual order imposed on the work.

John McPhee

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.

Peter Timms