Category: Arts Writing
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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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Art Guide Australia | Review: The 22nd Biennale of Sydney makes witnesses out of us all
This could be the catch-cry of the Biennale which, titled from the Wiradjuri word NIRIN and meaning “the edge,” delivers the artist as witness and the art as evidence. Lauded by almost everyone, the Biennale has been called “confrontational” and “consequential,” often followed by the fact that it’s the first time the event has been curated by…
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Art Guide Australia | Nell: It’s the Beginning of a New Age
One of Nell’s paintings, delivered in black, gold and white, declares, “It’s the beginning of a new age.” Originally found in the Velvet Underground song New Age, the lyric comes at the tune’s finale, and it doesn’t quite know which way it’s heading: the knowledge of leaving an old life behind is held against the lamentation of…
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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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Art Guide Australia | Interview: Eugenia Lim on ethics, absurdity and subverting stereotypes
With a practice encompassing video, performance and installation, Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent. Lim’s major exhibition The Ambassador is currently touring Australia, and brings together works featuring her invented persona, also called the ambassador, who she inhabits across multiple videos, performances and sites. Tiarney Miekus spoke to the artist about her ambassador character,…
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The Age | Problematic or romantic? Why self-taught artists don’t quite fit
If you ask Julian Burnside – the venerated lawyer, human rights advocate and art collector – why he bought the work of Samraing Chea, there’s a pause. “Well, Samraing’s drawings spoke to me in a way that was interesting,” he explains. “He showed me an idea of the world as he sees it – and…
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The Age | Where intimacy happens
Since art can be a mediating force for how a person can understand themselves and their life, and since life right now involves a perpetually interior existence between three or four rooms, I have lately been imagining myself as one of Prudence Flint’s painted women. Hunched and eating a lonely bowl of soup; completing the…
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Art Guide Australia | Brook Andrew on biennales, the art world and new ways of seeing
As artistic director of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, artist Brook Andrew is bringing together over 90 artists, creatives, collectives and communities from Australia and across the globe. Tiarney Miekus: The Wiradjuri word NIRIN is the title of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney. Can you talk about the meaning of NIRIN and how it emerged as a frame for the…
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Art Guide Australia | Review: Bauhaus Now!
In 2019 galleries and museums across the world are celebrating 100 years of the Bauhaus, the modernist German art, design and architecture school that radically influenced approaches to art creation and education. In acknowledging this centenary, Bauhaus Now! at Buxton Contemporary looks at the contemporary legacy of the Bauhaus and its Australian trajectory; aiming to reflect its…
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Meanjin | Is Art Pop? On Darren Sylvester’s Promises
In the 1997 film The Castle, the obvious-talking young narrator named Dale Kerrigan has a totalising faith in the promise of shared, familial love. Even the threat of potential house demolition, the material site of this ‘togetherness’, merely commits him further to the promise. Yet we only know this promise once it flickers; once it passes to…
Tiarney Miekus 