In Brooke Leigh’s video Searching For Alice, 2015-2017, scenes of a deciduous forest bereft of leaves are interspersed with close-up shots of a young woman’s mouth. She recites variations of a plaintive refrain, repeatedly wondering where Alice has got to and why she hasn’t come back. The voice gets increasingly agitated and staccato as the camera moves in closer and closer, until her mouth fills the screen. In this way, the artist captures both the anger and anxiety we can all feel when we are inexplicably left behind.
Leigh is crying out for the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole and went through the looking glass in the stories by Lewis Carroll. And even though for many these are beloved childhood tales of adventure and surreal mayhem, Leigh is quite right when she points out that there is a dark side to what happens to Alice. As the artist says, the character is just a child, vulnerable, frightened and alone.
“Alice experiences the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness so intensely that she cries an entire pool of tears large enough for her body to drown in.”
Leigh’s video will be shown in her solo exhibition Alice, Interrupted alongside a series of prints based on performative drawings. As an artist Leigh confronts trauma and repressed emotions, and her work is rooted in what she calls “intense psychological states”. In both her works on paper and performances, she explains, “the act of mark-making gives agency to a cathartic release, and materialises a sense of control over the intense and all-consuming experience of emotions related to my anxieties and fears.”
Alice, Interrupted
Brooke Leigh
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
14 – 24 June
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
