“Because what is the substance of our lives, except for the things we thought were significant?” From standing on clifftops to attempting to swim the English Channel, for over two decades Todd McMillan has created art on endurance, melancholia and absurdity—and he’s taking this further with new shows at Nicholas Thompson and Penrith Regional Gallery.
A photograph taken in 1995 is an incredible snapshot of talent, featuring seven First Nations artists who are now crucial figures in Australian art, alongside a very newly elected New South Wales premier, Bob Carr. Why was this picture taken? And what can it tell us now? Brenda L Croft reflects.
Congratulations to Wayne Quilliam for winning the 2022 National Photographic Portrait Prize for his powerful portrait of Aurukun man Eric Yunkaporta in ceremonial head-wear. Quilliam, a celebrated Aboriginal curator, photographer and filmmaker, likens his work as storytelling.
Looking at Chiharu Shiota’s art paradoxically offers an uncanny awareness of one’s bodily existence alongside the elusiveness of time. To see Shiota’s latest installation and works at Anna Schwartz Gallery is to be awe-struck.
“It’s not the last word in painting at all”: Like a Wheel That Turns at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) doesn’t focus on what painting is—but what painting can do.
Why aren’t more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in positions of power in the art world, and what needs to change? Wardandi (Nyoongar) Aboriginal woman and senior curator Clothilde Bullen explores these questions.
Several major art fairs and festivals are upcoming across Australia, from Sydney to Cairns to Darwin to South Australia—some of which are returning for the first time in several years. Whether it’s Indigenous art fairs or exciting showcases of art and performance, here’s our guide on what to see.
Traversing sculpture, painting and sound Afterburner reveals Michelle Ussher’s quest to represent and challenge understandings of femininity—particularly the shapes, expressions and actions that are associated with feminine artistic expression. View, in pictures, Ussher’s vibrant and evocative works at STATION gallery (Sydney).
“You constantly read about the revival of craft and textiles, but they’ve never gone away.” In a vast new exhibition at CAVES, over 50 artists from Australia and New Zealand shed light on the evolving conversations around textiles.
Working between Sydney and Paris, artist Mel O’Callaghan has a major new solo at Sydney’s Carriageworks. In our interview she talks about deep sea exploration, theories on the beginning of life, ancient festivals in India, and a prized mineral collection.
Although Karla Dickens’s home was spared in the recent Lismore floods, she’s attentively focused on the collective community of the town—and she’s also creating new art showing at Sullivan+Strumpf.
“It was like an open studio and an exhibition space and a home space, everything kind of intermingled in a really lovely way.”
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Multidisciplinary artist Tara Marynowsky reveals where she finds inspiration, the best time of day for creating and what we can expect to see in her current solo show Cave at Edwina Corlette Gallery.
Every two years, the Ramsay Art Prize opens to Australian artists under 40 working in any medium. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia and supported in perpetuity by the James & Diana Ramsay foundation, the prize seeks to spotlight contemporary artists at a formative moment in their careers.
Premiering at the Sydney Film Festival, artist, curator and filmmaker Nikki Lam’s The Unshakeable Destiny trilogy, shot on 16mm, Super 8 and digital, explores her hyphenated identity as a “settler-migrant”, through an upbringing in “city-state” Hong Kong and the enduring influence this has over her artistic practice in Australia.
Sophie Penkethman-Young dives into the cursed, chaotic and charming depths of the online world to create inquisitive artworks exploring technology, the internet and capitalism with humour.
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
