Category: Arts Reviews
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The Saturday Paper | Review: Frances Barrett’s ‘Meatus’ at ACCA
The body’s wordless vocalisations – the labour of breathing, the sound of gurgles, gasps of desire or fear – have a power that can be dangerous, erotic and disturbingly intimate. They escape the limits of language and permit something else to pour out. For the exhibition Meatus, Frances Barrett has transformed the Australian Centre for Contemporary…
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Art Guide Australia | Interview: Kiki Smith about being patient in the uncontrollable
Since the 1980s acclaimed American artist Kiki Smith has been creating multidisciplinary works on mortality, sexuality, nature and embodiment. From sculptures of the body, to drawings based on mythology and fairy tales, to incredible tapestries—which are showing for the Biennale of Sydney—Smith has pushed at the boundaries of form, creating works that are beguiling in…
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The Age | In a world of wonder, Piccinini asks us to value more than beauty
Newly dusted off, the deserted ballroom above Flinders Street Station is an arresting and quietly emotive space to encounter Patricia Piccinini’s hyper-real creatures. Accessible to the public after 25 years of closure, the venue is wondrous – as is the art. And wonder, which shouldn’t be mistaken for escapism, is something we need right now.…
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The Age | An unfinished landscape: She-Oak show sheds new light on classics
She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism Among plenty of paintings of the Australian landscape there are unexpected, flooring moments: one is a young toddler, dressed in her pink Sunday best, wobbling along, puffy arms floating for balance, a facial expression of soft surprise. This painting, by female Australian impressionist Iso Rae, is one of many emotive…
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The Age | Artist Danila Vassilieff was selling his house. There was just one catch
When Elizabeth Hamill visited Stonygrad in Warrandyte in 1947, the owner agreed to sell the house on one condition: that he came with it. Danila Vassilieff, a Russian emigre artist, had built the house by hand using rocks quarried from his property in the late 1930s. Hamill was beautiful, intelligent and wealthy. Vassilieff, a flamboyant…
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The Age | Around the galleries: Robert Fielding, Joy Hester and West Space
ROUTES / ROOTS | Robert Fielding. Robert Fielding traverses time. He melds traditional Indigenous cultural forms with contemporary art practices, where thousands of years of ancestral history are held in tandem with the colonial injustices of the past and present. Practising from Mimili in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia, Fielding shows…
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Memo Review | Ella Sowinska’s ’80 Ways’
Considering the amount of things that can be streamed online (i.e., entire lives), it’s peculiar how art is a thing that supposedly doesn’t happen on the internet. The reasons seem transparent; for some it’s a kind of moralism, the belief that aesthetic transaction happens in the flesh, not the digital, or that something vital is lost…
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Memo Review | Loyalty Does Not End With Death – Genesis P-Orridge at The Substation
Over the last five decades English artist, musician and poet Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has become the kind of person that others seek out. For some it might have been during the early 1970s when P-Orridge, and h/er involvement with performance art collective COUM Transmissions, was gathering attention for making use of soiled tampons, blood and…
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RealTime Magazine: Hearing through capital’s illusions
The exhibition statement for Capitalist Surrealism is the ultimate in sponsorship acknowledgements: “this program of lecture-performances by sound artists is brought to you by the new cultural logic of capital—real, but honestly, also kind of surreal.” A one-night event, Capitalist Surrealism aimed to assay capitalist social formation by thinking through the surreal processes and possibilities…
Tiarney Miekus 